I find that through the study of women, you get to the heart - the truth - of the culture.

Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance.

Every Iranian artist, in one form or another, is political. Politics have defined our lives.

In this Western world that we have, culture risks being [only] a form of entertainment.

Being political is an integral part of being Iranian. Our lives are defined by politics.

Art is no crime. It's every artist's responsibility to make art that is meaningful

Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images. I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form.

Beautiful woman wrapped in chadors, with huge machine guns in their hands. Brilliant, shocking, amazingly contradictory images. They compelled me to deeply investigate these ideas.

To me, editing is not something you can do in a rush because the artists themselves are not always their own best editors. Time is absolutely everything.

Nature has the most powerfully healing effect.

My mother is my last point of security in relation to my past, and if that breaks, I will not ever have that type of pure love or pure attachment.

We pass through Time from birth in order to have from where to come, together with death.

My encounters with racism are sort of second-hand situations where I might be standing around with a group of white friends and someone makes a comment that they wouldn't make at my family reunion.

Like every art form, there are jealousies and angers and competitiveness in magic. But there's camaraderie among magicians, whether you perform it for a living or you're an enthusiast.

It just seems clear to me that as long as we are all here, it's pretty clear that the struggle is to share the planet, rather than divide it.

Every Naval vessel has a contingent of Marines aboard. After all, the Sailors have to have someone to dance with.

The artful injury, whose venomed dart scarce wounds the hearing, while it stabs the heart.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

Of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

Every one of the songs was based around picking an acoustic guitar. That was part of the concept from the beginning, that the tempos were going to go from slow to almost mid-tempo.

The biggest obstacle I've had to overcome is being a woman in a man's world.