Azar Nafisi Quotes

When you look at 'Grapes of Wrath,' the weakest moments are those in which Steinbeck is spouting a political idea directly at the reader. The book's real power comes from its slower, broader movement.

It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.

Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.

No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.

I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

I'm obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can't help it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways I'm not sure it is now.

Shakespeare wrote about what was happening during the time; it still relates to us now.

I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'

I love Victorian novels, the way they capture the nuances of the human condition.

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.

'South Pacific' has a definite heaviness that people don't realize. It's got a seriousness and a message.

New fathers, political prisoners, traumatised presidential aides, resolute schoolboys, MEPs addressing unfriendly chambers - we all find that Shakespeare has magically anticipated our precise circumstances. How he was possible, I still don't understand; but there isn't a day I'm not grateful that he speaks to me in my own language.

We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture.

Theater publicly reveals the human condition through appealing to both intellect and emotion. Architecture, whether lowly or exalted, can do the same.

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

For me, the most absorbing films are those that address big questions and real ideas but embody them in small examples that we can appreciate and comprehend.

'The Hunger Games' isn't for everybody. But neither is 'Anna Karenina.'

In all my movies, be it 'Page 3', 'Chandni Bar' or 'Corporate,' I have tried to depict honesty and reality.

What is art? Art talks about life; it's subversive.

Most of the films that I've ever really responded to are ones that I feel were really involved in their times.

Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections.

I think some of the things I deal with Hopper probably has dealt with also, since it's somewhat the same environment and I have pretty strong reactions to what this country looks like. It looks pretty dull and spare, and you like this and dislike it and it's very complicated.

With Shakespeare, the hard work is to find out why he said it and how it can relate to the audience.