“The more people one has to love, the more one’s capacity to love stretches.”

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

It’s a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.

You can’t be a person and a lady. If you’re a person, you can open the damned door yourself.

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.

Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

To live in the past is to miss today’s opportunities and tomorrow’s blessings.

I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Vice is its own reward.

Never sweep. After four years the dirt gets no worse.

You fall out of your mother’s womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

To lose is not always failure.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

There’re so many things I want to do, like become more media savvy. I am too lazy. But I’m making an effort.

Geometry alone is not enough to portray human desires, expressions, aspirations, joys. We need more.

There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.

It is a unit of the Russian Federation. Its political status is not to be discussed any more.

There is more disgruntlement, but because there is no media, the voice of this opposition is not heard outside Iran.

I’m selling more records on my own than I did on major labels.

Listening is much more effective than trying to stop thought or cut it off.

But I know one thing for sure: That we, the Iranian people, are much more in line of danger than the West.