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 quality which evades description but differentiates one human being fro...
The more I discovered the lyrical quality of our lives, the more my own life became a web of fiction.
That first day I asked my students what they thought fiction should accomplish, why one should bother to read fiction at all. It was an odd way to start, but I did succeed in getting their attention....
Some within the government and some former revolutionaries had finally realized that there was no way the Islamic regime could make us intellectuals vanish. In forcing us underground, it had also made...
Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.
None of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them.
Incapaci di decifrare o di capire tutto ciò che fosse complicato o fuori dagli schemi, infuriati con quelli che consideravano serpi in seno, gli integralisti furono costretti a imporre le loro formule...
Imagine you are walking down a leafy path…The sun is receding, and you are walking alone, caressed by the breezy light of the late afternoon. Then suddenly, you feel a large drop on your right arm. Is...
Fiction was not a panacea, but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our world but that other world that had become the object of our desires.
Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.
هي فتاة مشتت الذهن غافلة ألا يكفي انها لم تتزوج بعد
«La mia fantasia ricorrente è che alla Carta dei Diritti dell'Uomo venga aggiunta la voce: diritto all'immaginazione. Ormai mi sono convinta che la vera democrazia non può esistere senza la libertà di...
You cannot just be stubborn against something, you need to be stubborn for something as well
You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar ,but the door is...
What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you f...
We lived in a culture that denied any merit to literary works, considering them important only when they were handmaidens to something seemingly more urgent—namely ideology. This was a country where a...
Un grande romanzo acuisce le vostre percezioni, vi fa sentire la complessità della vita e degli individui, e vi difende dall'ipocrita certezza della validità delle vostre opinioni, nella morale a comp...
This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.
These women, genteel and beautiful, are the rebels who say no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers (there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen's novels) and the rigidly orthodox...
There were many such instances, when expressions of sympathy could not be exchanged. What do you say to someone who is telling you about the rape and murder of virgins—I'm sorry, I feel your pain?