"Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been through an extra filter, another consciousness, in the guise of the translator. Some of my favorite writers who have written in English were doing so without English being their first language, so there's a sense of distance or of distortion there, too. Conrad. Nabokov. These writers were employing English in interesting ways."

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I need to have one foot inside and one foot outside a culture to be able to write about it. For example, I couldn't write about the gay culture if I were wholly inside or outside of it. Finding that distance is always interesting. I jokingly say that when I'm in America, I write about Beirut, and when I'm in Beirut, I write about America. A lot of my friends in Beirut think I'm more American than Lebanese. Here, my friends think of me more as Lebanese.

— Rabih Alameddine