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

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

Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.

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.

She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn't exist.

I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.