Said Sayrafiezadeh Quotes

Of course, I had a paradigm of a certain city in my head when I wrote these stories, a city that inspired my imagination, but it was only inspiration.

When the ending finally comes to me, I often have to backtrack and make the beginning point towards that ending. Other times, I know exactly what the ending will be before I begin, like with the story “A Brief Encounter With the Enemy.” It was all about the ending – that’s what motivated me.

I liked the push and pull of that, between the outer political world and the inner personal lives of the characters. It’s also real life… Many of us are keenly aware of world events, but break your nose and I bet that’s the main thing you’d be focused on.

I take pride in taking care of all the housework so that my wife, who works as a designer for Martha Stewart, won’t need to sacrifice any of her leisure time when she gets home.

The year the bus drivers went on strike in Pittsburgh, I was twenty-three and living on the edge of the city in a neighborhood that was on the verge of becoming a ghetto. I had just been fired from a good job as a cartographer in a design studio where I had worked for about four months.

In many ways I’m similar to Barack Obama, who also has a strange name but was raised by a white American mother. His background is far more complicated than his name would suggest. Furthermore, the fact that I was a child during the hostage crisis has caused me to equate being Iranian with being alienated.

I suppose my Iranian identity is one of the driving forces for being a writer: I want to set the record straight about who I really am.

My characters are not underachievers; they aspire to great things, but they are limited by the world around them.

More people work at Walmart than anywhere else in the United States, but you wouldn’t know that from our literature. I’m trying to get at the reality of this country by portraying the lives of many of my friends who I left behind in Pittsburgh.

My childhood was defined by my father’s absence. His presence looms so large. Up until the age of 18, he was a superstar for me.

I wake when my wife wakes, at 7:30 A.M. I’d like to sleep longer, but she has to go off to work, and I’d be plagued with guilt.

I was born in Brooklyn and raised in Pittsburgh. I’ve never been to Iran, I don’t speak the language, and, probably most important of all, my Iranian father left home when I was nine months old. That’s the extent of my connection to Iran.

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.

There’s always been something a little pathetic for me at the work parties I’ve attended, especially thinking back to the restaurants I worked in. I remember a Christmas party in which we all got free T-shirts with the restaurant on the front and our names on the back.

Stasis is something that has marked my life since I was a boy growing up in Pittsburgh with my mother. It was the natural state that we existed in. For one thing, she suffered from a debilitating depression throughout my childhood, and depression is nothing if not static.

I feel more Jewish than I do Iranian.

The difference between our family and other poor families was that my mother actively chose to be poor. She was highly literate, and she had a college degree, but after my father left, she took the first secretarial job she could find and never looked for other employment again.