American author Quote by Elliott Colla

In the Green Zone in Iraq you have your radio, you have your food, you have your own electricity, your own toilets. Everything is…

— Elliott Colla

There are certainly times in history where power associates itself closely with fields that we would call the humanities, like rulers surrounding themselves with…

— Elliott Colla

A high-ranking Syrian official in DC laughed when he heard I was reading Michel Aflaq and writing this book. He said, "Let me tell…

— Elliott Colla

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

— Elliott Colla

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

— Elliott Colla

In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically…

— Elliott Colla

You always have regime-friendly poets like Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, whose career basically spans the twentieth century. He's an anti-imperialist, friendly with the Communists, and…

— Elliott Colla

Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't…

— Elliott Colla

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…

— Elliott Colla

Michel Aflaq - is bad poetry wrapped in the guise of utopian politics, or great poetry wrapped in the guise of horrible politics.

— Elliott Colla

Each discipline has the capacity to be interested in politics, and each would ask different questions of what politics is, what constitutes power, how…

— Elliott Colla

The more I've reflected on that and asked Iraqi friends, the more I realize that the corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with…

— Elliott Colla