Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

I am suddenly left alone again on the sunny path, with a memory of the rain.

I eat my heart out alone.

Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.

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.

A novel is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.

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