Art & Creativity Quote by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

There is something almost feral in the way Makhmalbaf describes reading: not as self-improvement, not as a “love of literature,” but as compulsion. The triple-stacked “read and read and read” doesn’t decorate the sentence; it reenacts the loop, the trance. “Like an obsession” is both confession and diagnosis. For a director whose work is shaped by post-revolution Iran, censorship, and the ethics of representation, that obsession reads as survival tech: a private escape hatch and a DIY education when public life is policed and options narrow.

The phrase “When I came out” carries loaded air without specifying from where. Prison is the obvious context in Makhmalbaf’s biography, but the quote stays strategically unspecific, letting the line stand for any kind of enforced confinement: incarceration, ideological enclosure, the claustrophobia of a society that controls stories. The image of “20 books” is intentionally excessive, almost comic in its extremity, because excess is the point: to drown out the noise of reality, to replace a restricted world with a portable one.

Then comes the quiet turn: “It took me a while to change that habit.” Not “break” it, not “recover,” but “change” - a filmmaker’s verb, suggesting editing rather than erasure. The subtext is that reading saved him, but it also threatened to become another cell. Art, for Makhmalbaf, isn’t born from leisure; it’s forged in the hard negotiation between refuge and living.