Marjane Satrapi Quotations

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

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 movie business is not about the money. Of course, you need money to make the movie. If you have a small budget, adapt yourself. Having $200 million dollars doesn't ensure that you're definitely going to make a good movie. There's so many examples that prove that.

When you make a book or you make a movie, it is almost like hitting on somebody. It's not because you want to seduce people that you will seduce them; you can hit on somebody and it doesn't work. But when you hit on them and it works, then it's really cool.

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

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.

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

A Muslim fanatic and a Christian fanatic, a Jewish fanatic, a secular fanatic, an atheist fanatic, a communist fanatic - all of them are the same. The thinking that, 'If you don't think like me, that if you are not with me, then you are against me;' this is something to condemn.

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.

You hear people saying, 'Oh I'm so tired, I've had enough of Cannes.' How can you have enough of Cannes? It's just the best place to be, like a fairytale.

I have my dark side. You have your dark side. From the second that we have a brain, there are things that are not right - we are human beings with all these illusions and complexes and everything. That's attractive to me.

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.

I don't think of myself as a rebel; I just say what I think.

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.

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.

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

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

People, they think that animation is a style. Animation is just a technique. It's like, people, they think that comics is a style, like comics is a superhero story. Comic is just a narration, and is a medium, you can say any kind of story in comics and you can say of any kind of story in animation.

I am very bad at computers. I don't really know how to write email.

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.

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

My culture comes from everywhere. I'm sick of this notion of nationality, that if you're brought up in the same city or same country you're the same. Even three kids brought up in the same family with the same genes, they are not the same. Just consider a human a human.

I'm a pacifist. I believe there are ways to solve the world's problems. Instead of putting all this money to create arms, I think countries should invest in scholarships for kids to study abroad. Perhaps they could become good and knowledgeable professors in their own countries. You need time for that kind of change, though.

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.

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

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 always say to people, 'You know, if Romeo and Juliet got married, nobody would care about them.' Imagine Romeo and Juliet, six kids yelling, 'Mama, Mama, Papa, Papa!'

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.

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.

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.

You know, comics were created at the same time as the cinema. And the cinema very quickly became a major art. Cartooning didn't become a major art. There's a reason for that. People don't know how to deal with drawings.

The music that I hate the most is R&B.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not a politician because I'm an artist. Politicians have a very easy answer for a very complicated question. I have a very complicated question for what you consider very easy situations.

In the West, people don't have any real problems. It's all based on bad conscience, a very Christian notion. I don't have any bad conscience. If there's a God that created us, if I am bad, it's his fault.

If the majority of people were right, we'd be living in paradise. But we are not living in paradise, we are living in hell. What does it mean? That means the majority of people are wrong. So I never believed what people told me.

I don't think that I have ever been rebellious. The thing is that I don't believe in people - what people tell me. I have to accept it in my own brain first. I don't listen to anyone, never.

Any medium can only live up to the strengths of the people working in it. If it's been used to tell bad or boring stories, it's not a problem with comics; it's a problem with the writers of those comics.

Words also are filters. They have to be translated. Even in the original language, there is interpretation and some ambiguity. If there's a cultural difference between the writer and the reader, that might come out in words. But with pictures, there's more efficiency.

Comics are just another medium to express yourself. It's not cinema; it's not literature; it's just something else. It has a specific requirement, which is that images are used to tell the story. There are lots of crappy movies, with guns and action and Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever.

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.

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.

Here [in the USA], you have the best laws for freedom of expression. The problem is that expression can be bought by people who don't want you have it. Apparently, true patriotism destroys freedom of expression.

I don't believe in the clash of cultures. The culture is one. The culture is a ring off the same chain. Picasso was very much influenced by the African arts, and he influenced a whole other generation of artists. So everything influences everything.

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.

Start [the movie] in color. Color is always attributed as fun, and black and white is very sad.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The things that I do today are the things I did as a child. When I was a child, either I was drawing or I was taking all the kids off my street and I wanted to make shows - I was all the time making! The only thing is, now I know how to do it better, and now they give me money for it.

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.

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

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

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.

George W.Bush can go and kill thousands of Iraqis every day. By making people believe they are the enemy, and not human beings any more. If evil has an address, a nationality, you can exterminate all of them. This is fascism.

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 almost don't know how to write an email.

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.

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

The novels have done so well because the drawings are abstract, black-and-white. This adds to the universality of the story. "Persepolis" also has dreamlike moments, and the drawings help maintain cohesion and consistency.

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

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.

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

I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living.

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.

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.

Well, I would have much preferred to have had a normal childhood. I would have loved it if my greatest dilemma, at 14, was whether to go to Benetton for my pullovers. I would have preferred not to have cried all the tears I have cried.

I really didn't know what to think about the veil. Deep down I was very religious but as a family we were very modern and avant-garde. I was born with religion. At the age of six I was already sure I was the last prophet. This was few years before the revolution.

'The Jungle Book.' It's one of the best animated films ever. I saw it when I was small at a cinema in Tehran.

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 Germans sell chemical weapons to Iran and Iraq. The wounded are then sent to Germany to be treated. Veritable human guinea pigs.

In every religion, you find the same extremists.

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

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.

The information I have about Iran is second hand.

In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!

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

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.

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

Teacher: What do you want to be when you grow up? Marji: I'll be a prophet.

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

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

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

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

I like to be sad once in a while. You need it for your equilibrium.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Cinema is a world of imagination.

Business is very personal. For me, everything is extremely personal. With actors, the fact that I write helps, because when you say to an actor "Oh I want you to do it a little bit more ...," without saying what you want more of, then the actor doesn't know what to do. But if you can put into words exactly what you want, then the experience of writing is helpful with that.

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

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

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