My work has never been autobiographical. Although the subjects are driven on a personal perspective it's sort of elevated above me. I try to express something that is more a collective expression of crisis.

There's something when you're always immersed in the natural landscape where it becomes your healer, in a way, at the same time that it also becomes sort of frightening. I guess that's how I see things, in that form of duality.

Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images. I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form.

Magical realism allows an artist like myself to inject layers of meaning without being obvious. In American culture, where there is freedom of expression, this approach may seem forced, unnecessary and misunderstood. But this system of communication has become very Iranian.

I really am a strong believer that with editing, it should take a long time. Even you yourself are not capable of making the right decisions; sometimes you need a distance.

Beautiful woman wrapped in chadors, with huge machine guns in their hands. Brilliant, shocking, amazingly contradictory images. They compelled me to deeply investigate these ideas.

We're either awake or we're sleeping. During the time that we're awake, we work very hard at denying things, mainly because we have to function as people. We have to control and repress everything that we're fearful of, because it doesn't make sense to go crazy on the streets, but in reality we hide and we hide, repress and repress, our fears of the world of violence, of separation, of death, and sometimes hopes, and some things that are very joyful, reunions or all of those good things. It's only in dreams that we're really truthful with whatever hurts most; they're really very real.