Quotes by Azar Nafisi

About Azar Nafisi:

Azar Nafisi is an Iranian writer and professor of English literature. She has resided in the United States since 1997 and became an American citizen in 2008.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I would like to say how much I resent people who say of the Islamic Republic that this is our culture - as if women like to be stoned to death, or as if they like to be married at the age of nine.

Azar Nafisi

When I first left Iran at the age of 13, Iran had become such a shining star - it was the point to which all my desires and dreams returned.

Azar Nafisi

Un romanzo non è un'allegoria” dissi verso la fine della lezione “È l'esperienza sensoriale di un altro mondo. Se non entrate in quel mondo, se non trattenete il respiro insieme ai personaggi, se non vi lasciate coinvolgere nel loro destino, no...

Azar Nafisi

I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintin...

Azar Nafisi

None of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them.

Azar Nafisi

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.

Azar Nafisi

There are different forms of seduction, and the kind I have witnessed in Persian dancers is so unique, such a mixture of subtlety and brazenness, I cannot find a Western equivalent to compare it to. I have seen women of vastly different backgrounds t...

Azar Nafisi

. . . none of us are as sophisticated in these matters as you think. You know I always feel, with every new person, as if I am starting anew. These things are instinctive. What you need to learn is to lay aside your inhibitions, to go back to your ch...

Azar Nafisi

Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly emphasize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does this say about my life, my pains, my anguish?

Azar Nafisi

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.

Azar Nafisi

The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.

Azar Nafisi

The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique quality which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.

Azar Nafisi

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

Azar Nafisi

My toe as a lethal weapon!

Azar Nafisi

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of i...

Azar Nafisi

The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in ones own home." 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 questi...

Azar Nafisi

[V]alue your dreams but . . . be wary of them also, . . . look for integrity in unusual places.

Azar Nafisi

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against...

Azar Nafisi

But perhaps there is another, more personal reason for my disagreement with Ramin: I cannot imagine myself feeling at home in a place that is indifferent to what has become my true home, a land with no borders and few restrictions, which I have taken...

Azar Nafisi

Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose farmers read Homer. “A native of America who cannot read or write,” said John Adams, “is as rar...

Azar Nafisi

Author Bio

  • NameAzar Nafisi
  • DescriptionIranaian academic and writer
  • BornDecember, 1955
  • CountryIran
  • ProfessionWriter; Professor; Novelist
  • WorksReading Lolita In Tehran
  • AwardsRome Prize