War & Peace Quote by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

There’s a quiet provocation in the schedule: 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., reading as if it were factory work. Makhmalbaf isn’t romanticizing books so much as describing an extreme condition of solitude - the kind you don’t get in a normal life because normal life is noisy with obligations, people, and choices. His line lands with a double edge: it’s a testimonial to self-making through art, and a hint that the “peace” came from somewhere that wasn’t freely chosen.

As an Iranian director whose life and career were shaped by upheaval, censorship, and political consequence, Makhmalbaf’s biography hangs behind the phrasing. The key word is “left.” Not “I chose to be alone,” but “to be left alone so much” - a passive construction that suggests confinement, exile, or institutional isolation without spelling it out. Reading becomes both refuge and resistance: a way to build an inner world when the outer world is constrained. It’s also a sly inversion of punishment. What should be deprivation becomes abundance, a private education conducted at maximum intensity.

The craft lesson is embedded in the reminiscence. Cinema is often discussed as spectacle, but Makhmalbaf points to its more literate engine: a director’s imagination fed by long, uninterrupted attention. The wistfulness is real, but it’s not nostalgia for hardship; it’s nostalgia for a rare kind of focus that adulthood, freedom, and success often destroy.