When I was a kid, I wanted to make my parents happy. I'd always say to them, "What do you want me to do? Do sports? Be rich? Be funny?" My mother would say, "Whatever we want from you, you already gave us - we wanted you to be alive, and you made it."

Sometimes the stories are smarter than me, and suddenly these things start to make sense.

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.

I think that any authentic feeling one has of life should be a feeling of defeat. It's a losing game. You're going to die. Civilization is going to end. Our society is in decline, and we should feel OK about it because Roman society was in decline and before it the Assyrian one was, and they disappeared off this earth and we will disappear too.

My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

If you want to learn how to be happy, you have to know what is sadness first.

Being published in Arabic is a strong and consistent wish I have. I live in the Middle East and want to be in some sort of an unpragmatic dialogue with my neighbors.