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.

Marjane Satrapi

Yin Wit Wing

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Life Why Very

Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it's better to do both.

Marjane Satrapi

Age You Writing

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Yin Wit Wing

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

Marjane Satrapi

War West Up

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

Marjane Satrapi

Women Men True

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Life You Who

All big changes of the world come from words.

Marjane Satrapi

Change World Words

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

Marjane Satrapi

Without Wit Thou

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

Marjane Satrapi

Life Death Write

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Life Art Anger

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Life You Will

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Time Change Write

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.

Marjane Satrapi

You Wit Wish

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Men Life Experience

Image is an international language.

Marjane Satrapi

Age T National

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Time Money Knowledge

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

Marjane Satrapi

Men Love Today

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Life You Way

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Humor Age Writing

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Change You Word

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.

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Anything that has a relationship with pleasure, we reject it. Eating, they talk about cholesterol; making love, they talk about AIDS; you talk about smoking, they talk about cancer. It's a very sick society that rejects pleasure.

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

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

Marjane Satrapi

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

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

I had two major activities as a child. I was trying to put on shows with kids in my street, or I was drawing. Actually, what I'm doing now is exactly what I was doing then. Either I'm drawing, or I'm gathering people for a common project. The only difference is that now they are paying me for that.

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

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

Marjane Satrapi

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

Marjane Satrapi

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

Marjane Satrapi

I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word 'home' has only one meaning: Iran. I suppose it's that way for everyone: Home is the place where one is born and raised.

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

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

Marjane Satrapi

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

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

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

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

Death, torture and prison are part of daily life for the youth of Iran. They are not like us, my friends and I at their age; they are not scared. They are not what we were. They hold hands and scream: 'Don't be afraid! Don't be afraid! We are together!' They understand that no one will give them their rights; they must go get them.

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

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

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

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

Marjane Satrapi

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.

Marjane Satrapi

The information I have about Iran is second hand.

Marjane Satrapi