All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us—fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheat...
Pragmatists are sometimes more prone to illusion than dreamers; when they fall for something, they fall hard, not knowing how to protect themselves, while we dreamers are more practiced in surviving t...
I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you di...
She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.
This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices repres...
The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home. Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced u...
I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned...
Don't let strangers touch you. And yet it is seldom strangers, I learned long before I was a teenager, who do you harm. It is always the ones closest to us: the suave chauffeur, the skilled photograph...
Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.
We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.
There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned id...
The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the ot...
I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more...
I blame my generation for having neglected to teach our children that in life there are no safe places, that safety is an illusion. Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistlin...
But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with n...
A good novel is one that shows the complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all these characters to have a voice; in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democr...
. . none of us are as sophisticated in these matters as you think. You know I always feel, with every new person, as if I am starting anew. These things are instinctive. What you need to learn is to l...
When I first left Iran at the age of 13, Iran had become such a shining star - it was the point to which all my desires and dreams returned.
يشجعوننا على إظهار مشاعر حبنا للإمام بأقصى أشكال التعبير مغالاة، بينما يحرّمون علينا أن نظهر أي تعبير علني عن مشاعرنا الشخصية، وأعني الحب بشكل خاص
Whoever fights monsters, Nietzsche had said, should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.