I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic..

There is little consolation in the fact that millions of people are unhappier than we are. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more c….

A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes w….

The more we die, the stronger we will become.

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..

My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching..

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

After the rigged Iranian presidential elections in 2009, the Islamic regime attacked the 'humanities' as the main source of protests, the most effect….

It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refra….

The stories from Iran's present and past are reminders that freedom, democracy and human rights, or fundamentalism, fascism and terrorism are not geo….

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. ….

Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know..

She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time..

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 s….

I believe in empathy. I believe in the kind of empathy that is created through imagination and through intimate, personal relationships. I am a write….

Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the….

If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself tha….

I'm a perfectly equipped failure..

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and m….

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 one….

Only curiosity about the fate of others, the ability to put ourselves in their shoes, and the will to enter their world through the magic of imaginat….