Quotes by Said Sayrafiezadeh

About Said Sayrafiezadeh:

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is an American memoirist and fiction writer living in New York City. He won a 2010 Whiting Award for his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free. His short-story collection, Brief Encounters With the Enemy, was short-listed for the 2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction. He serves on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts.
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My childhood was defined by my father's absence. His presence looms so large. Up until the age of 18, he was a superstar for me.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

While writing my memoir, 'When Skateboards Will Be Free,' I would sometimes have to pore over hours of microfilm at the New York Public Library in order to try to get one obscure detail right. For instance, was the Socialist Workers Party originally ...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

In many ways I'm similar to Barack Obama, who also has a strange name but was raised by a white American mother. His background is far more complicated than his name would suggest. Furthermore, the fact that I was a child during the hostage crisis ha...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

I suppose my Iranian identity is one of the driving forces for being a writer: I want to set the record straight about who I really am.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

There was something so immensely redemptive and exciting for me to imagine that my unknown father was not just a man who had abandoned me but a noble man of adventure who had no choice.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

I feel more Jewish than I do Iranian.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

I need to feel as if everything is clean and in its proper place before I can even attempt to write one word. At least, that's what I tell myself. I make the bed, I put away the dishes, maybe I dust, maybe I do the laundry, maybe I go to the post off...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

The difference between our family and other poor families was that my mother actively chose to be poor. She was highly literate, and she had a college degree, but after my father left, she took the first secretarial job she could find and never looke...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

I have no personal experience in the military. All I know about it is what I've seen in movies and read in books and watched on television. My knowledge is probably no more or no less than the average person's. 'A Brief Encounter with the Enemy' was ...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

Other families who are poor do what they can to get out of it. My mother did not. She did not utilise her resources. She had a degree. There was something she could have done, but she actively, purposely refused that so we could have this absolutely ...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

I am haunted by what my life would have been had I not had the courage in my early twenties to leave Pittsburgh for New York City and really commit to being a writer. Pittsburgh is both post-industrial and provincial, and the opportunities there are ...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

I was born in Brooklyn and raised in Pittsburgh. I've never been to Iran, I don't speak the language, and, probably most important of all, my Iranian father left home when I was nine months old. That's the extent of my connection to Iran.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

I take pride in taking care of all the housework so that my wife, who works as a designer for Martha Stewart, won't need to sacrifice any of her leisure time when she gets home.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

I have to expend an awful lot of energy actively undoing the impact of my name. Understandably, people assume that I have at least some connection to Iran. The truth is that I don't. I have very little knowledge about the culture, the language, the h...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

My sister married an American and took his name, and my brother has shortened Sayrafiezadeh to Sayraf. So now he's Jacob Sayraf, or sometimes Jake Sayraf. He made the change when he was a teenager, prior to the Iranian revolution and the hostage cris...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

There's always been something a little pathetic for me at the work parties I've attended, especially thinking back to the restaurants I worked in. I remember a Christmas party in which we all got free T-shirts with the restaurant on the front and our...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

It's very difficult for me to look at politics with clear eyes. I'll read a story in the paper and the first thing that pops into my head is, what would my dad say about that? Then I try to break out of that and think, 'What would Said say about that...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

The year the bus drivers went on strike in Pittsburgh, I was twenty-three and living on the edge of the city in a neighborhood that was on the verge of becoming a ghetto. I had just been fired from a good job as a cartographer in a design studio wher...

Said Sayrafiezadeh

My characters are not underachievers; they aspire to great things, but they are limited by the world around them.

Said Sayrafiezadeh

Author Bio

  • NameSaid Sayrafiezadeh
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • Born1968
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter