Quotes from Azar Nafisi

In the Damascus airport she had been humiliated by what she was assumed to be, and when she returned home, she felt angry because of what she could have been.

Have you ever noticed, I said, cracking a nut, how strange it is when you look in the mirror of the opposite wall that instead of seeing yourself, you see the trees and the mountains, as if you have magically willed yourself away?

It seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the personal or private.

He was baffled by Hemingway, felt amibvalent about Fitzgerald, loved Twain and though we should have a national writer like him. I loved and admired Twain but thought all writers were national writers and that there was no such thing as a National Writer.

Certain memories, like the imaginary balloons Yassi made with her delicate hands when she was happy, rise from somewhere in the depths of what we call memory. Like balloons, these memories are light and bright and irretrievable, despite the 'air sadness' (Bellow's term) surrounding them.

Well, that is the crux of the great novels," Manna added, "like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, or James's for that matter—the question of doing what is right or what we want to do.

A novel is not an allegory . . . It is the 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 empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.

quoting Cary Grant) A word, like a lost opportunity, cannot be taken back once it hass been uttered.

He also recommended that women dress properly when sleeping, so that if their houses were hit, they would not be "indecently exposed to strangers' eyes.

We are not against cinema," Ayatollah Khomeini had declared as his henchmen set fire to the movie houses, "we are against prostitution!")

We in ancient countries have our past--we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

Much later, when I read a sentence by Nabokov—"curiosity is insubordination in its purest form

I see a bird like a cock, which means good news, but you yourself are very agitated. A road that looks bright. And you are on the first step. You are thinking of a hundred things at the same time. One road is closed and dark, and the other is open and full of light. Both could happen; it is your choice. There is a key; a problem will be solved. ... A small ship that is still in the harbor and has not yet started to set sail.

Well, that was in 1995 when I resigned from my last academic job.

Every culture has something to be ashamed of, but every culture also has the right to change, to challenge negative traditions, and create to new ones.

What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.

I think Islam is in a sense, in crisis. It needs to question and re-question itself.

A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.

I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.

Unfortunately for governments like that of Iran, when they forbid something, people become more interested.

Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed.

The stories from Iran's present and past are reminders that freedom, democracy and human rights, or fundamentalism, fascism and terrorism are not geographically and culturally determined, but universal.

When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.

Thus the regime has deprived Iranian women not just of their present rights, but also of their history and their past.