It [9/11 tragedy] was the spectacle, what al-Qaeda gets its main power from - why their terrorism truly earns the word "acts." They are very theatric…

- Porochista Khakpour

In South Pasadena, artists were around but invisible somehow. Even though it was just a fifteen-minute drive from Downtown LA, it felt worlds apart. …

- Porochista Khakpour

I guess none of the sides of my hyphen are particularly subtle cultures. But perhaps there is also a sense that these characters are all parentless -…

- Porochista Khakpour

Addiction is a very compelling subject for literature - especially now that it's nearly impossible to come out of adult experience without some addic…

- Porochista Khakpour

I wanted to literalize the surreal here. Those are my favorite kinds of stories. I love when Gabriel García Márquez does that, for instance - it adds…

- Porochista Khakpour

I write first drafts feverishly fast, and then I spend years editing. It's not that sentence-by-sentence perfectionist technique some writers I admir…

- Porochista Khakpour

Because for me to go fully experimental, it would turn into an artist book actually. And I'm not opposed to that. But I wanted to toy with the conven…

- Porochista Khakpour

The original Zal story by Ferdowsi gives a very moving account of an infant who had all odds against him - he was left to die in the wilderness and a…

- Porochista Khakpour

But literature, I discovered, can also save you. Truly. Over the cliché and through the truth, it can save.

- Porochista Khakpour