Marjane Satrapi Quotes

I'm not a very good financing person. I don't even know how much money I have in my bank account. I never have opened one single envelope from the bank - they freak me out.

The information I have about Iran is second hand.

Revolutions just spread blood. Evolution - this is something that changes in the long term.

It's cinematographic to smoke. Imagine Lauren Bacall without a cigarette.

There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.

I took three years of karate because of Bruce Lee, you know. I was a green belt.

I had so many professions before. I didn't want to do this particularly. It just happened.

I don't watch many comic-book movies. But I loved 'Sin City.'

A real love story has to finish bad. That is what I think.

I'm not a politician. I don't know how to solve the problems of the world. But as an artist, I have one duty: to ask questions.

To tell you the truth, I never wanted to become a moviemaker. It was like I was a cinepihile, and I go, like, three or four times per week to the cinema, and I like to watch films.

I'm not a religious person at all.

This clash of the culture, East and the West, us and them, Muslim and Christian, does not exist.

I don't make a career plan. I take things the way they come.

It's true that, in Iran, women have half of the rights men do. And yet 66 per cent of students are women.

Life is complex. You don't have any person who is nice from the beginning until the end. You don't always have the notion of redemption. The bad people don't always pay.

I'm a very individualistic person. That is why I don't belong to any political party or anything. I really believe in justice and freedom.

I don't consider myself as a feminist but more a humanist.

I think with pictures; I'm a very lousy writer. If I write without pictures, I become this pathetic chick sitting somewhere trying to be interesting.

I'm very open and never write what I'm going to say. Speeches bore everybody else. I have to freestyle. Every time, from one program to another, everything changes and I improvise.

I think that all stories - if you make movies about zombies and aliens - it has always to do with your personal story. If not directly, it is about your fears, your obsessions, things like that.

I don't want to quit smoking. I am convinced that if I quit smoking, the world would go to hell.

I don't like 'graphic novel.' It's a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating - it's just a media type.

I never wanted to make a graphic novel. As soon as you become a 'writer,' you have to be intelligent all the time... I like the fact that I have the right once in a while to say silly things.

You have to be narcissistic to be an artist. You have to think you are the centre of the whole thing otherwise why do you create? The only thing is to recognise it, and then you make the best of it.

Life is absolutely unbearable. And we're going to die.

For me, who loves to draw and who loves to write and cannot choose between one or the other, the comic is the best form.

The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing.

For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.

America is a very special place. In this country, you have the best and the worst at the same time. Whatever you can imagine.

If today I have to make a political statement, it is, 'I love beauty.' I think beauty makes people better.

In every religion, you find the same extremists.

As a director, you have to understand what is happening - if I don't understand it, you can't make changes.

I realized then that I didn't understand anything. I read all the books I could.

You know, the cynicism that is in the politics, it is not for my soul. It makes me - out of me, an extremely bitter, cynical person that I hate to see in the mirror, really.

I love the French for their sarcasm, their irony. I love them for their bad moods.

Once again, I arrived at my usual conclusion: one must educate oneself.

Drawing - it's the first language of human beings, before writing, before even talking, before words, human beings was drawing.

You cannot be completely nice. It's impossible. Who is it? Who is the perfect guy? Show him to me! It doesn't exist. And thank god.

I almost don't know how to write an email.

If you're not [Federico] Fellini you might make something very vulgar. Animation made it possible to maintain unity with all these different narratives.

I loved Chiara Mastroianni voice, her talent, her generosity. We rehearsed for two months...She's a workaholic and perfectionist, like Vincent [Paronnaud] and myself.

A well-trained cat doesn't exist because a cat remains a cat.

A cat can never be well-trained because they're too independent.

But violence is news, to a certain extent, and people don't want complicated news. Because as soon as you realize things are complicated, your life becomes more complicated.

I'm not somebody that keeps the thing in her heart. I can get very angry for five minutes, but then it's finished. Once I've yelled, it's over.

I was a child who had a life, who had hopes, and I wished that a bomb would not fall on my head.

The language in a comic book or a graphic novel and the cinematographic language are really not the same language. They are false brother and sister. It's not at all the same.

Today, we don't talk about history. The past is two weeks ago, and the future is two weeks after.

If you know a little bit the psychology of human beings, you have to understand that if you say something you should not do, then everybody wants to do it.