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

In the past 30 years, officials of the Iranian regime and its apologists have labeled criticism, especially with regard to women's rights, as anti-Islamic and pro-Western, justifying its brutalities by ascribing them to Islam and Iran's culture.

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

i could have told him to learn from Gatsby. from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flash and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream.

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

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

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