Azar Nafisi Quotes

She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and ...

A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter tha...

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in ...

There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citi...

But it was women like Rudabeh who planted in my mind the idea of a different kind of woman whose cou...

Look at these magnificent women, I thought, created in such misogynistic and hierarchical societies,...

Most serious confrontations in life are not political, they are existential. One can agree with some...

What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. Yo...

I no longer believe that we can keep silent. We never really do, mind you. In one way or another we ...

Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which ...

Don't let strangers touch you." And yet it is seldom strangers, I learned long before I was a teenag...

Our personal fears and emotions are at times stronger than public danger. By keeping them secret, we...

correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap...

The price one pays when choosing exile is the loss of all that defines you as an individual. The onl...

All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.

When the founding fathers conceived of this new nation, they understood that the education of its ci...

Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there...

But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine ...

[A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by ...

Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress,...

The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaki...

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had und...

Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale, I said. Well, I would agree. First, let me remind you ...

We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into t...

My toe as a lethal weapon!

And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem...

One of the most wonderful things about Pride and Prejudice is the variety of voices it embodies. The...

A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual expe...

Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes in...

I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly ...

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the ...

I went on and on, and as I continued, I became more righteous in my indignation. It was the sort of ...

. . . none of us are as sophisticated in these matters as you think. You know I always feel, with ev...

It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are inc...

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers...

Both Yassi and I know that we have been losing our faith. We have been questioning it with every mov...

Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how compl...

We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract fil...

He is more rooted to the idea of home. He created this home...and established routines like watching...

...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort...

The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of o...

There were no public articulations of these humiliations, so we took refuge in accidental occasions ...

The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." Most great works of the imagi...

Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them...

It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in class. I was yo...

Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual's personality into account. It is only throug...

You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place...like you'll not only miss the people ...

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy ...

These characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory...

Only Catherine has the capacity to change and mature, although here...our heroine pays a dear price ...

Even the mild-mannered Sophia Western of Tom Jones and Richardson's annoyingly pious Clarissa Harlow...

All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us—fictions about themsel...

I searched modern fiction and poetry for clues to how we confronted and evaded reality, how we artic...

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

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

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

[V]alue your dreams but . . . be wary of them also, . . . look for integrity in unusual places.

There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so uniqu...

She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, in...

The truth is that James, like many other great writers and artists, had chosen his own loyalties and...

Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. Th...

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

I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to i...

I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The proble...

It is not just bookstores and libraries that are disappearing but museums, theaters, performing arts...

A message was sent by the regime to the faithful: to survive they would have to be loyal to only one...