As we grown-ups talked and speculated, my five-year-old daughter looked intently out of the window. Suddenly she turned around and shouted, Mommy, Mommy, he is not dead! Women are still wearing their...
Art is as useful as bread.
She explained why all the normal acts of life had become small acts of rebellion and political insubordination to her and to other young people like her. All her life she was shielded. She was never l...
We must thank the Islamic Republic for making us rediscover and even covet all these things we took for granted: one could write a paper on the pleasure of eating a ham sandwich. And I said, Oh, the t...
These people, he had said with his inscrutable smile, are different from us. They don’t care about books and such things.
There is seldom a physical description of a character or scene in and yet we feel that we have seen each of these characters and their intimate worlds; we feel we know them, and sense their surroundi...
The room was full when I walked in, but as soon as I took my place behind the desk, my nervousness left me.
The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The only thing that makes this immense loss tolerable is the discovery of a self you did not know existed -...
Such an act [testifying for an accused prison guard of the Shah's regime] can only be accomplished by someone who is engrossed in literature, has learned that every individual has different dimensions...
She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of her sacred relationship to God, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbol...
Non sminuire mai, in nessuna circostanza, un'opera letteraria cercando di trasformarla in una copia della vita reale.
Most people have a way of radiating their potential – not just what they are, but what they could become.
Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe.
L'insensibilità è tipica anche dei personaggi negativi di Jane Austen: Lady Catherine, Mrs Norris, Mr Collins o i Crawford. Il tema ricorre inoltre nell'opera di Henry James e negli eroi-mostro di Nab...
L'empatia è il cuore di Gasby, come di molti altri romanzi. Non c'è niente di più riprovevole che restare ciechi di fronte ai problemi e ai dolori altrui.
I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the f...
Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a cyclon...
Empathy lies at the heart of , like so many other great novels--the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence.
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
Did you ever dream this could happen to us? He said, No I didn't, but I should have. After we all helped create this mess, we were not doomed to have the Islamic Republic. And in a sense, he was right...