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.
In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This.
The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.
Reading a novel is not an exercise in censure.
Dreams, Mr Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality?
The more I discovered the lyrical quality of our lives, the more my own life became a web of fiction.
You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are positioned, and from your own perspective, and so you cannot say there is only one way of seeing a chair, can you? No, obviously not. If you cannot say this about so simple an object as a chair, how can you possibly pass an absolute judgment on any given individual?
It is said that the personal is political. That is not true, of course. At the core of the fight for political rights is the desire to protect ourselves, to prevent the political from intruding on our individual lives. Personal and political are interdependent but not one and the same thing.
He was baffled by Hemingway, felt amibvalent about Fitzgerald, loved Twain and though we should have a national writer like him. I loved and admired Twain but thought all writers were national writers and that there was no such thing as a National Writer.
Brewing and serving tea is an aesthetic ritual in Iran, performed several times a day. We serve tea in transparent glasses, small and shapely, the most popular of which is called slim-waisted: round and full at the top, narrow in the middle and round and full at the bottom. The color of the tea and its subtle aroma are an indication of the brewer’s skill.
It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless.
I left Tehran on June 24, 1997, for the green light that Gatsby once believed in.
German thinker Theodor Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.” I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.
The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted.
A good novel is one that shows complexity of individuals, and creates enough space for all those characters to have a voice, in this way a novel is called democratic – not that it advocates democracy but that by nature is is so.
We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.
We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. – Henry James.
She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves. It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.
As Fitzgerald puts it, “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
What we have here is the first lesson in democracy: all individuals, no matter how contemptible, have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Books know no limits or borders, they create longings and unexpected passions, they pose more questions than answers. They represent the unruly world, filled with contradictions and complications, a world that threatens the totalitarian mindset by being beyond its control.