Marjane Satrapi Quotes

Third: live together as long as you feel truly happy. Life is too short to be lived badly.

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.

In a place like Israel, they're very concerned with Iran, so there's a lot of interest. So they want to see what this Iranian from France has to say in her comics. I guess that's good. My the books are coming out in other countries. And each time, they discover something different to be interested in.

You see a picture and you understand perfectly, immediately, the basic thing that's happening. It's probably more accessible because we are in a culture of images. People are used to seeing stories that way. They understand looking at pictures.

Rule number six: Everybody should have a car
Rule number seven: All maids should eat at the table with the others
Rule number eight: No old person should have to suffer
Grandmother: In that case, I'll be your first disciple.
Persepolis: Really?
Grandmother: But tell me how you'll arrange for old people not to suffer?
Persepolis: It will simply be forbidden.

I finally understood what my grandmother meant. If I wasn't comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable.

You know, I'm a really individualistic person. I'm extremely narcissistic and egocentric, too. So I have one life, and I have to live it the way I want.

With animation, if something does not fit, you always have the time to change it. When you make a live-action movie, when your days of shooting are over, they are over forever.

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

I am absolutely not a feminist, I am against stupidity, and if it comes from males or females, it doesn't change anything. If it means that women and men, they are equal, then OK, certainly I am a feminist.

We found ourselves veiled and separated from our friends.

I'm extremely unbearable. You know, I'm narcissistic and at the same time I'm very charming - I think.

My real background was in art studies. At the beginning I was a painter, then I was this graphic designer, then I became an illustrator, then I was a comic artist. But for me it's a different way of expression, a different field of art. They're not separated; everything for me is related.

I think animation is like running a marathon, and making a movie is like a 100 meter sprint. The question is: are you a marathon man or are you a sprinter? I realized that I was more of a sprinter than a marathon man. With a long, long project, I get bored easily.

Racism is not nearly as important as poverty. That's the same around the world. What look like ethnic problems are really economic issues. If you look closely at all these conflicts around the world, they come down to poverty and economics and resources. The more poverty, the worse the war.

All this misjudgment that we have of each other is based on ignorance. The second you get to travel, you see that human beings, no matter where they come from, they are the same.

It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name, that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.

I like to make mechanical stuff. Once I make a film I have to do whatever I can make onstage I make it onstage.

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.

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

Politicians think they have answers for everything. We artists, we only have questions.

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.

The most exciting time is when I think of an idea and how I imagine I can make it. It would be wonderful if there was a projector inside my eye that and it could just put the idea on the screen for people to see.

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

I like making comics and animation because it takes such a long time. I'm not a runner of the 100 meter. I like marathons. The longer it takes, the better I feel.

Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that's why they can say they're so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!

People are so afraid to say the word 'comic'. It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to 'graphic novel' and that disappears.

One must educate oneself

Certainly, they'd had to endure the war, but they had each other close by. They had never known the confusion of being a third-worlder, they had always a home!

There's this scene in "The Night of the Hunter" when the kids are downstairs, and you have the feeling that they're both in a room and at the same time it looks remote. And you wonder, How can you give the effect of both "inside" and "outside" at the same time. And you realize, by watching it many times, that around the scene there's this black edging.

Not everybody loves their children. If that was a fact, all the children would be happy and they would make happy adults. Instead, we have lots of miserable children that later became miserable adults. This is a fact. We cannot change that.

I believe that am entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists.

I wrote the plot [for the Persepolis ]and Vincent [Paronnaud] and I wrote and discussed the shooting of the script. Vincent then took care of the production design, the actual shooting, and what was going on within each scene. It's very difficult, though, to draw a line between who did what. Because Vincent would say something, and I would add something, and at the end you have this film, yet no clear idea of who did what.

One isn't born courageous, one becomes it.

If hair is as stimulating as you say then you need to shave your mustache

I've never seen or touched anything."
"Can you explain then how you had children?"
"You're right. It's true I have four kids. Four! But still I have never seen the male organ. He came into the bedroom, he turned off the light, and then Bam! Bam! Bam! and voila I was pregnant! What's more, I was granted four girls. So I have never seen penises.

Cinema is a world of imagination.

Whether this tale be true or false, none can tell, for none were there to witness it themselves.

My mother was the favorite child of her parents. My father was the favorite child of his parents. The result of these two favorite children was me. And I am an only child. So I was convinced that I was the center of the universe.

I read "The Second Sex."
Simone explained that if women peed standing up, their perception of life would change.
So I tried. It ran lightly down my left leg. It was a little disgusting.
Seated, it was much simpler. And as an Iranian woman, before learning to urinate like a man, I needed to learn to become a liberated and emancipated woman.

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

Americans think cinema is about storytelling; I don't believe that. I think it's a language and everyone has to find their own way of speaking. It's not so much what you say as the way you say it.

We always say we are equal in front of death, but when you are rich, for example, and you have everybody taking care of you, I think that you suffer much less. It must be much more painful to die when you are poor than when you are rich. But when your heart is broken, you can be rich, poor, whatever - a broken heart, we are all equal in front of it. And I think there is no subject more serious.

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

It's wonderful to have international friends.

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.

When you say 'revolution' when you have only men outside, you know that something is going wrong. I'm not like a hardcore feminist, but I think that one of the things that makes the society advanced is equality between men and women. If half of the society is oppressed by the other half, it's not fine.

I have been brought up open-minded. If I didn't know any people from other countries, I'd think everyone was evil based on news stories. But I know a lot of people, and know that there is no such thing as stark good and evil. Isn't it possible there is the same amount of evil everywhere?

One can forgive but one should never forget.

They found records and video-cassettes at their place, a deck of cards, a chess set. In other words, everything that's banned.

I think the only universal thing is one individual. If you talk about a country or a nation or a culture, it's so vague. I mean what is a nation? A nation is full of nice and bad and long and tall and short and thin people. It's not like everybody is the same.

For me George Bush is just as scary, if not more. Because he doesn't look like a scary guy, because he's shaved and he has a tie on. But he's a real fanatic - a fanatic by definition is the one who says, if you are not with me, you are against me, and that's exactly the position he takes. The mullahs in my country, it's obvious. But a guy who says I am the president of the biggest secular democracy in the world and asks people to read the Bible and make crusades and says he's God's best friend - this guy is even more scary because you don't see it at the beginning.

Of course, when you remember your life, you never remember anything in a chronological way. You always have pieces of memories, and some of these memories are full of details and very colorful. Some of them you just see the action and it's completely blank.

That's the story of life - when you start enjoying people, it's always too late.

The way that you remember your life, it's never linear. You have flashes of different moments of your life, and the flashes aren't equal; they have different styles.

Life is too short to be lived badly.

We can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable. Once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it.

My point of view when I make a book or I make a movie is to see the humanistic point of view. The point of view of the daily life of normal people.

Ouch! What are you doing, Karl, you broke my skull!

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

To die a martyr is to inject blood into the veins of society

It's not like since I make comics I only read comics and since I make movies I will only go out and watch movies. Any kind of artistic expression interests me; it goes from literature to music to sculpture, painting; whatever is extremely inspiring for me becomes a reference also for me.

Writing is not for me. I completely lose my sense of humor when I write. I become extremely pathetic, very sensational. Images give me possibilities that I don't have with words.

Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.

I asked him what his work was. He answered that he devoted all his time to his political activities ... He was undoubtedly busy with the diplomatic relations between his testicles and women's breast.

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

Human beings have a lot of problems identifying themselves with other human beings who don't resemble them exactly. But there's something about drawing that means that anyone can identify to a drawing. I mean, people can identify themselves with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.

You must base everything on these three rules: behave well, speak well, act well.

You never have these moments that, you know, are always perfect. Always something happens.

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.

Smoking kills you, but life kills you, and if you don't want to die, go into a freezer when you are born and nothing will happen to you.

Adaptation of books is never a success. When the author wants to make it, it's even worse.

It's fear that makes us lose our conscience. It's also what transforms us into cowards.

I have always thought that if women's hair posed so many problems, God would certainly have made us bald.

In every religion, you find the same extremists.

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

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

I wanted to do my artistic work, and in Iran you have censorship. It was difficult for me to do the work I wanted to do.

Anyway, that's how it is! Either they obey the law, or they're expelled!! And make sure they wear their veils correctly ... " - "If hair is as stimulating as you say, then you need to shave your moustache!" My father actually said that.

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.

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.

If people are given the chance to experience life in more than one country, they will hate a little less. It's not a miracle potion, but little by little you can solve problems in the basement of a country, not on the surface.

With live-action I think we'd have lost the universal appeal of the Persepolis story. With live-action, it would have turned into a story of 'the Other' - people living in a distant land who don't look like us. It might have been exotic, but also a "Third-World" story.

Here's the problem: the description of the world is always reduced to yes or no, black or white. Superficial stories. Superhero stories. One side is the good one. The other one is evil.

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.

I try to look at life carefully and reproduce life the way life is. It's a question of looking carefully at how it is. In life, you don't have total happiness. People always say that. But you don't have total sadness either, no matter what situation you are living in.

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

The most natural thing for us is drawing. The characters [in Persepolis] are hand drawn. We're not technical people. We don't know how to type.

The revolution is like a bicycle. When the wheels don't turn, it falls.

Night brings good counsel", my grandmother always told me.

I think the best work of the director is to listen to what all the technicians around him have to say, but then the thing is to take the best decision, what you think is the best. Then, that is the moment where you have to have all the film in your head and imagine how all of that will fit together.

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.

I wanted to be an educated, liberated woman. And if the pursuit of knowledge meant getting cancer, so be it.

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

I'm happy to see you so well-settled here. Now you must make an effort, you must become somebody. I don't care what you do later, only try to be the best. Even if you become a cabaret dance, better that you dance at the lido than in a hole in the wall.

In retrospect, I can see that I had always known that it wouldn't between us. But after my pitiful love story in Vienna, I needed to believe in someone again...

It's always extremely interesting to speak at colleges. My books are taught in many colleges in America and are part of the educational system, so it's really important to me. I don't believe in so many things in life, but something I believe in is education.

Guns may shoot and knives may carve, but we won't wear your silly scarves!

People don't know anymore why we've had eight years of war. Why their children have died ... This entire war was just a big setup to destroy both the Iranian and the Iraqi armies. The former was the most powerful in the Middle East in 1980, and the latter represented a real danger to Israel. The West sold weapons to both camps and we, we were stupid enough to enter into this cynical game ... eight years of war for nothing! So now the state names streets after martyrs to flatter the families of the victims. In this way, perhaps, they'll find some meaning in all this absurdity.

Maybe the biggest problem is that there's no empathy. Nobody puts themselves in the place of others. Everyone thinks they are the only one to suffer. Or that they're the only ones who like ice cream or take their kids on vacation.