As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's ofte….

Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary..

And as journalists we look for differences - differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We're very sensitized to difference, ….

So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim, an architec….

In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drow….

In Germany, you have a huge official memorial to the murdered Jews and then you have this artist who's been putting these stumbling blocks, these bra….

Work less than you think you should. It took me a while to realise there was a point each day when my creativity ran out and I was just producing wor….

In America time was gold; in Bangladesh, corrugated tin..

I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way b….

Sorrow can be a bully..

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for u….

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro..

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel..

The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Isla….

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it ass….

I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Childre….

As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get bene….

Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge..

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I ass….

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from not….

While researching 'The Submission,' I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was ab….