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

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.

A single conversation can change things.

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.

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.

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

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?