Art is as useful as bread.

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

When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.

Look at Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution and the slogans that they used: anti-imperialism; anti-colonialism; the struggle of the have-nots against the haves; the state monopoly over economy, which was very much patterned after the Soviet Union. All of these things did not come out of Islam. Islam is not that developed.

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?

Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.

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.