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

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.

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

We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings. To me it seemed as if we had not really existed, or only half existed, because we could not imaginatively realize ourselves and communicate to the world, because we had used works of imagination to serve as handmaidens to some political ploy.

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.

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

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