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

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

What we search for in fiction is not so much reality, but the epiphany of truth.

A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.

Memories have ways of becoming independent of the reality they evoke. They can soften us against those we were deeply hurt by or they can make us resent those we once accepted and loved unconditionally.

There is little consolation in the fact that millions of people are unhappier than we are. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more content?

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.