All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.
Readers were born free and ought to remain free.
You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'...
With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.
Why is it that in novels with a message, the villains are so reduced that it is as if they come to us with a sign on their forehead saying: Beware, I am a monster? Doesn’t the Koran state that Satan i...
Why do tyrants understand the dangers of a democratic imagination more than our policy makers appreciate its necessity?
We were unhappy. We compared our situation to our own potentials, to what we could have had, and somehow there was little consolation in the fact that millions of people were unhappier than we were. W...
One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else’s dreams. In t...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.' So declared Yassi in that special tone of hers, deadpan and mildly...
I have now become something of an expert in the ways of decisive men. They are not firm, they just seem to be. Because they have a formula for everything, which they forcibly impose, they seem confide...
Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by force.
Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.
Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the nove...
As women, do we have the same rights as men to enjoy sex? How many of us would say yes, we do have a right, we have a equal right to enjoy sex, and if our husbands don't satisfy us, then we have a rig...
Art is as useful as bread.
And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby
Again she repeated that she would never get married, never ever. She said that for her a man always existed in books, that she would spend the rest of her life with Mr. Darcy—even in the books, there...
After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.
Adesso che non potevo più pensare a me come a un'insegnante, una scrittrice, che non potevo più indossare quello che volevo, né camminare per strada al mio passo, gridare se mi andava di farlo o dare...
A novel is not an allegory...it is a sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to...