Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as usueful as bread.

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.

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

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

This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?

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.

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