Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.