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
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.
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.
The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.
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.
All big changes of the world come from words.
It's cinematographic to smoke. Imagine Lauren Bacall without a cigarette.
For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Image is an international language.
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.
If today I have to make a political statement, it is, 'I love beauty.' I think beauty makes people better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don't want to quit smoking. I am convinced that if I quit smoking, the world would go to hell.
The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think of myself as a rebel; I just say what I think.
This clash of the culture, East and the West, us and them, Muslim and Christian, does not exist.
America is a very special place. In this country, you have the best and the worst at the same time. Whatever you can imagine.
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.
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 consider myself as a feminist but more a humanist.
I love the French for their sarcasm, their irony. I love them for their bad moods.
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 am very bad at computers. I don't really know how to write email.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
'The Jungle Book.' It's one of the best animated films ever. I saw it when I was small at a cinema in Tehran.
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 like to be sad once in a while. You need it for your equilibrium.
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.
The information I have about Iran is second hand.
