Elliott Colla Quotes

#1. The corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power.

Elliott Colla

#2. It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know.

Elliott Colla

#3. I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.

Elliott Colla

#4. Palestinian society is filled with poetry, but not experimental poetry. The Palestinian poetry that people know is not the modernist experimentations, it's certain kinds of poetry that lends itself to recitation and song and things like that.

Elliott Colla

#5. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft.

Elliott Colla

#6. There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state.

Elliott Colla

#7. In trying to imagine this world, I kept coming back to Michel Aflaq. He's a Christian Arab, a Syrian, who ends up finding his home in Iraq and is buried there - I was stunned to see his tomb is right smack down in the Green Zone.

Elliott Colla

#8. Arabs don't do crime fiction. I read crime fiction and I read Arabic literature, and I wish this was a novel I could have read in Arabic.

Elliott Colla

#9. In translation you have to get it right, you have to be precise in what you're doing. You have to attempt what they did in that language - say, in Arabic - and try to accomplish a version of that in English, and you're constantly serving two masters.

Elliott Colla

#10. Just as certain Cold War binaries were collapsing, new binaries of Sunni versus Shia or Arab versus Kurd were being created by the new occupation force. It's the corruption of that moment that I am really interested in.

Elliott Colla

#11. Why is thinking about crime or imagining crime so goddamn central to pop culture? It doesn't matter whether it's American TV or British TV. And there's entire sections of bookstores devoted to crime.

Elliott Colla

#12. Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.

Elliott Colla

#13. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.

Elliott Colla

#14. In a couple of Ahdaf Soueif's novels, she gets at the certain kind of English that's being spoken by Egyptians. It's a beautiful, expressive English but it is non-standard, "broken" English that happens to be efficient, eloquent, and communicates perfectly well even if it is breaking rules.

Elliott Colla

#15. When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.

Elliott Colla

#16. The one thing that is braver each day than I is my sense of self-preservation It moves not, and stands not, unless it is driven by something

Elliott Colla

#17. Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

Elliott Colla

#18. Noir is where the clarity of moral divisions break down, the black and whites turn into grays.

Elliott Colla

#19. We like to look out on the world and see ourselves, so we have many, many novels, memoirs, and short stories in Iraq that are largely about Americans in Iraq, doing what Americans do.

Elliott Colla