“It's very difficult to talk about religion in Iran because religion has gotten so mixed up with politics.”

“You must know that Iran has a great number of productions. Many films are released. Most of them, like in the rest of the world, are commercial and shallow films. These are the most popular ones. A...”

“Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.”

“Iranian filmmakers are not passive. They fight whenever they can, as creative expression means a lot to them. The restrictions and censorship in Iran are a bit like the British weather: one day it'...”

“Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side win...”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”