I have a deep love for the art of translation, and I couldn't find a novel that captured the fascinating, reckless adventure of it as I'd experienced it, or portrayed translators as the passionate risk-takers that so many of the translators I know are. So I wrote the book I couldn't find.

Humor is serious work. But it keeps everybody at the table.

I've never had the impulse for someone else to translate me into my own language. My impulse has always been to translate someone else into mine.

It would be great if I woke up tomorrow and could speak Persian. Wouldn't you love to wake and have a language in your mind that wasn't there the night before?

What is the task of the translator? I think the task depends on the book and on the translator.

It's the best motivation to have a particular beloved reader in mind! Because you feel this urgency that you really want somebody you care about to be able to experience a sentence the way you experienced it in another language.

I think we think that American books are funny or they're serious literature. But humor is subversive. When you add an element of absurdism, you can get away with more, work in dark, daring questions you might not have written toward otherwise.