You learn a lot, writing fiction.

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

I rather like getting away from fiction.

I am addicted to arrivals, to those innocent dawn moments from which history accelerates.

The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.

Born in Jerusalem, Wadie Said went from being a dragoman to a salesman in the United States and thence to a hugely successful businessman in Egypt.