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.

Life is too short to be lived badly.

The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.

All big changes of the world come from words.

Drawing is the first language of the human being before writing. It's a transcription of how the human being sees reality, not reality itself.

When we're afraid, we lose all sense of analysis and reflection. Our fear paralyzes us. Besides, fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators' repression.

Culture and education are the lethal weapons against all kinds of fundamentalism.

My mother always told me I had to do 100 times better than a man. I had to work hard at maths, and learn four languages.

The world is not about Batman and Robin fighting the Joker; things are more complicated than that. And nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.

The best thing I ever did in my life was to ask, 'Do I like everybody?' And the answer was, 'No.' So why should everybody like me? If people are against me, so what? I'm against them too.

Nothing's worse than saying goodbye. It's a little like dying.

It is not against reason, said the Englishman, to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on your finger – how much easier to understand the same price for the gash in your soul.

There is neither replay of time nor life.

You have to have courage to look back and be honest about your own drama.

We believe in personal choice, rather than society dictating how we must live our lives.

My intuition comes up with better stuff than my head, I think.

Evolution has led to some populations of people being able to digest milk without much trouble when they're adults as well.

There is at least as much eloquence in the voice, eyes, and air of a speaker as in his choice of words.

Frivolity is the species' refusal to suffer.

I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.

Never throw caution to the wind. It could whip back into your eyes and blind you.