To me, editing is not something you can do in a rush because the artists themselves are not always their own best editors. Time is absolutely everything.

Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance.

I find that through the study of women, you get to the heart - the truth - of the culture.

Every Iranian artist, in one form or another, is political. Politics have defined our lives.

In this Western world that we have, culture risks being [only] a form of entertainment.

Being political is an integral part of being Iranian. Our lives are defined by politics.

Art is no crime. It's every artist's responsibility to make art that is meaningful

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

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.

Nature has the most powerfully healing effect.

My mother is my last point of security in relation to my past, and if that breaks, I will not ever have that type of pure love or pure attachment.

There is no sin too great for God's grace. There is no habit too big for his healing. There is no label too strong for his love.

Experience and Demonstrate the Agape Love, is far more than Gold - Go for it

It is a challenge to love someone who does not see the divine as you do, and much harder still to date someone who considers your spirituality a design flaw in an otherwise worthwhile human being.

A new novel awaits my arrival, prepares for my careful inspection. Yet a novel is always a long dream that lives in me for years before I know where to go to hunt it out.

It's not about what we take with us when we die, it's about what we leave behind

Art is difficult. Its not entertainment.

Those who will not face improvements because they are changes, will face changes that are not improvements.

It is too easy to say 'what if' and paint a picture of a perfect world.

The deeper the Self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux.

Intellectual liberty [is] the right to think right and the right to think wrong. Thought is the means by which we endeavor to arrive at truth.