Azar Nafisi Quotes

Every great work of art ... is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life.

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.

Once we know of atrocities we cannot remain silent, and knowledge inevitably leads to an urge to protect the innocent.

That, of course, is what great works of imagination do for us: They make us a little restless, destabilize us, question our preconceived notions and formulas.

You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.

I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we articulate what has happened to us through the kind of people we become.

It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.

The negative side of the American Dream comes when people pursue success at any cost, which in turn destroys the vision and the dream.

I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.

I eat my heart out alone.

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.

When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?

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.

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

None of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them.

Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, 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.

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

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.

With fear come the lies and the justifications that, no matter how convincing, lower our self-esteem.

those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account.

Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

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

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 we believe in.

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry?

It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.

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

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

I'm a perfectly equipped failure.

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 would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our culture - as if women like to be stoned to death, or as if they like to be married at the age of nine.

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

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 content?

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.

Khatami is a symptom and not the cause of change in Iran.

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 that was now in constant retreat.

Art is as useful as bread.

The more we die, the stronger we will become

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

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

The existence of the writer is to write, and to write is to tell the truth.

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

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.

For more than 30 years the Islamic regime and its apologists have tried to dismiss women's struggle in Iran as part of a western ploy.

The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

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.

We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.

...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.

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.

The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and nationality. His true country, his home, was that of the imagination.