Top 23 Said Sayrafiezadeh Quotes
#1. My characters are not underachievers; they aspire to great things, but they are limited by the world around them.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#2. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#3. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#4. I need to feel as if everything is clean and in its proper place before I can even attempt to write one word. At least, that's what I tell myself. I make the bed, I put away the dishes, maybe I dust, maybe I do the laundry, maybe I go to the post office.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#5. I don't feel any ethical dilemma when I write. In my memoir, I was able to write with candor about the two most difficult people in the world to write with candor about - mom and dad. Everything else is downhill from there.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#6. It's very difficult for me to look at politics with clear eyes. I'll read a story in the paper and the first thing that pops into my head is, what would my dad say about that? Then I try to break out of that and think, 'What would Said say about that,' and then it gets complicated.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#7. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#8. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#9. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#10. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#11. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#12. I work in the most non-Communist job. I work for 'Martha Stewart Living.'
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#13. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#14. The thematic links came a little later, after I noticed I was gravitating towards certain elements - war, city, weather. So it wasn't all planned out from the start, it came out of the process.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#15. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#16. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#17. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#18. I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc ... I'm like a composer with a symphony in their head: I can hear the music, I just have to figure out how to put it down on paper. But I don't always know where my stories are going when I begin.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#19. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#20. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#21. There was something so immensely redemptive and exciting for me to imagine that my unknown father was not just a man who had abandoned me but a noble man of adventure who had no choice.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
#23. 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.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
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