My writing, like everything I do, comes profoundly from my heart. I believe that if you follow your heart you will be successful in one way or another. Old-fashioned as that might sound, the philosophy is true.

It is normal for me to wake and find myself writing in the dark... or to be out of my tomb, caught in an unearthly world, alive with the images that haunt me.

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell.

We will all, someday, experience death, and become obsolete as a dead leaf falling from a tree, crushed by passersby to ashes underlying the earth.

Often by the time writers and producers try to get a new hit song, the industry has already moved on. Whatever you're creating might not be as hot as it would have been during the time of your first hit. It definitely compromises the creative process when the music is changing and evolving so fast. If you're not on top of it, you will be forgotten.

When people do marriage right, they don't complain so much, and so their voices are silenced by the rabble of promiscuous charlatans peddling their pathetic world view as 'progressive.'

Picture-taking is an ensemble art - like theater.

My sister married an American and took his name, and my brother has shortened Sayrafiezadeh to Sayraf. So now he's Jacob Sayraf, or sometimes Jake Sayraf. He made the change when he was a teenager, prior to the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. So I don't think it was motivated by any anti-Iranian sentiment in the United States.