“People copy, people steal. Most of the pictures they make nowadays are loaded down with
special effects. I couldn’t do that. I quit smoking because I couldn’t reload my Zippo.”

“I couldn’t remember the last time I had stayed up into the squeaky hours of the night because I couldn’t put a book down, and that was a tragedy.”

“He was marrying my girl, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I just had to watch it happen, because he was my brother, because I promised..”

“Fiction and nonfiction accomplish very different things, but they can overlap. I wanted my fiction to seem nonfictional, and my nonfiction to seem fictional. At the same time, in fiction I could say things I couldn’t get away with in nonfiction without footnotes. And in nonfiction, I could make things explicit that I couldn’t say in fiction because of the viewpoint of my protagonist.”

“When it broke down, I would break down. I had to wean myself from it just to survive. I had to have interventions. People would say, ‘You’ve got to do something else.’ So that was part of it—being too dependent on this thing I couldn’t count on.”

“People often say I started to become too outspoken after a certain period. It’s all because of the Internet. If we didn’t have this technology I would be same as everybody else. I couldn’t really amplify my voice.”

“Feeling judged? I couldn’t care less. You know why? Because my wife and I were judged all throughout our relationship. People laughed, scoffed and poked fun at the young, celibate, naive Christian couple.”

“In Tehran university, at the math club, where I was studying the pictures of Fields medalists were lining the walls. I looked at them and said to myself, ‘Will I ever meet one of these people?’ At that time in Iran, I couldn’t even know that I’d be able to go to the West.”

“How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?”

“All is going well, very well, I couldn’t ask for anything better—
So why do I hate my life?”