Azar Nafisi Quotes

Television has raised writing to a new low.

Only bad writers think they're good.

I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?

Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue... whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.

With a great moral issue involved, neutrality does not serve righteousness; for to be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.

The ecological crisis is a moral issue.

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

Abortion is black genocide...What happens to the mind of a person and the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience?

It should be lifted above partisanship because it's a question of survival. It's a moral issue.

Those who are most moral are farthest from the problem.

It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.

It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.

The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .

One thing I love about Cormac McCarthy is the types of pressure he puts onto people. You see the best and the worst in people, you really see what humanity is made of, and I think that resonates in some way.

Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

But here is the heart of the moral issue for many of us. Simply put, those around the world who have contributed least to global warming and climate change will be the most and first to be impacted by the consequences of it all. Sadly, it's an old story. We, the affluent, create the problem, and the poor pay the price for our sins. It is wrong, and it is a sin-ours.

Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.

What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.

If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it

There never was an age in which so many people were able to write badly.

The second book, which was probably more from a professional standpoint - when I read Junot Díaz's Drown, I was like, Oh my god, you can write these stories and people will actually read them beyond your own little community. This guy's book is blowing up and it seems like [he's writing about] the neighborhood that I grew up in. That was a big deal. I read that in graduate school, so that's when I was really taking writing seriously, but I didn't know you could do it. I didn't know you can actually be an author. It was a weird epiphany.