Quotes from Azar Nafisi

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 una pacca sulla spalla a un collega maschio, adesso che tutto ciò era diventato illegale, mi sentivo evanescente, artificiale, un personaggio immaginario scaturito dalla matita di un disegnatore che una gomma qualsiasi sarebbe bastata a cancellare

These characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness...what James's characters gain is self-respect.

And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.

But it was women like Rudabeh who planted in my mind the idea of a different kind of woman whose courage is private and personal. Without making any grand claims, without aiming to save humanity or defeat the forces of Satan, these women were engaged in a quiet rebellion, courageous not because it would get them accolades, but because they could not be otherwise. If they were limited and vulnerable, it was an audacious vulnerability, transcending the misogyny of their creator and his times.

The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful, but I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facets of their lives so that their secrets are safe.

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.

Switzerland had somehow become a bywordfor Western laxity: any program or action that was deemed un- Islamic was reproached with a mocking reminder that Iran was by no means Switzerland.

Is it possible to write a reverent novel," said Nassrin, "and to have it be good? Besides, the contract with the reader is that this is not reality, it's an invented world. There must be some blasted space in life," she added crossly, "where we can be offensive, for God's sake.

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

There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions to weave our resentments and hatreds into little stories that lost their impact as soon as they were told.

This is Tehran for me: its absences were more real than its presences.

Almost every day, my students would recount such stories. We laughed over them, and later felt angry and sad, although we repeated them endlessly at parties and over cups of coffee, in breadlines, in taxis. It was as if the sheer act of recounting these stories gave us some control over them; the deprecating tone we used, our gestures, even our hysterical laughter seemed to reduce their hold over our lives.

A good novel is one that shows complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all those characters to have a voice, in this way a novel is called democratic - not that it advocates democracy but that by nature is is so.

We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.

A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. 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. I just want you to remember this.

In our case, the law really was blind; in its mistreatment of women, it knew no religion, race or creed.

the condemned man's only privilege is to know the time of his death

Shouldn't he want to know about something that has happened to his mother, that will happen to his wife, his sisters, his daughter and, I went on morosely, if ever he has an affair, even to his mistress?

We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.—Henry James

She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves. It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.

We had always segregated sex from feeling and from intellectual love, so you were either pure and virtuous, as Nassrin's uncle had said, or dirty and fun. What was alien to us was eros, true sensuality.

In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This

Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is useful as bread.

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 from the other.