Top 100 Marjane Satrapi Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#4. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#5. I'm extremely unbearable. You know, I'm narcissistic and at the same time I'm very charming - I think.
Marjane Satrapi
#6. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#7. If you're not [Federico] Fellini you might make something very vulgar. Animation made it possible to maintain unity with all these different narratives.
Marjane Satrapi
#8. A cat can never be well-trained because they're too independent.
Marjane Satrapi
#9. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#10. 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
#11. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#13. I was a child who had a life, who had hopes, and I wished that a bomb would not fall on my head.
Marjane Satrapi
#14. 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
#15. I believe that am entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists.
Marjane Satrapi
#16. Prosperity consists of two things: tea after a meal, and a cigarette after tea.
Marjane Satrapi
#17. 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
#18. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#19. If you have a little sensibility or a heart, you have all the reason to be depressed once in a while. But the depression is like a motor for creation. I need a little bit of depression, a bit of acid in my stomach, to be able to create. When I'm happy, I just want to dance.
Marjane Satrapi
#20. If today I have to make a political statement, it is, 'I love beauty.' I think beauty makes people better.
Marjane Satrapi
#21. 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
#22. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#23. 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
#24. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#26. That's the story of life - when you start enjoying people, it's always too late.
Marjane Satrapi
#27. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#28. To tell you the truth, I never wanted to become a moviemaker. It was like I was a cinepihile, and I go, like, three or four times per week to the cinema, and I like to watch films.
Marjane Satrapi
#30. A real love story has to finish bad. That is what I think.
Marjane Satrapi
#31. You know, they say in France that translation is like a woman: she is either beautiful or faithful.
Marjane Satrapi
#32. I like to make mechanical stuff. Once I make a film I have to do whatever I can make onstage I make it onstage.
Marjane Satrapi
#33. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#34. Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.
Marjane Satrapi
#35. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#36. Life hangs from so slender a thread. Life is but a sigh ...
Marjane Satrapi
#37. 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
#38. I love the French for their sarcasm, their irony. I love them for their bad moods.
Marjane Satrapi
#39. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#40. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#41. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#42. Teacher: What do you want to be when you grow up?
Marji: I'll be a prophet.
Marjane Satrapi
#43. I'm not somebody that keeps the thing in her heart. I can get very angry for five minutes, but then it's finished. Once I've yelled, it's over.
Marjane Satrapi
#44. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#45. Revolutions just spread blood. Evolution - this is something that changes in the long term.
Marjane Satrapi
#46. 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
#47. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#49. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#50. Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that's why they can say they're so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!
Marjane Satrapi
#51. It's not disgusting, that little skin that hangs?"
"The foreskin? No, it's okay. I think that generally speaking , a dick isn't really photogenic."
"I quite agree.
Marjane Satrapi
#52. Culture and education are the lethal weapons against all kinds of fundamentalism.
Marjane Satrapi
#53. 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!
Marjane Satrapi
#54. I want to be justice, love and the wrath of God all in one.
Marjane Satrapi
#55. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#56. If it's a good work of adaptation, the book should remain a book and the film should remain a film, and you should not necessarily read the book to see the film. If you do need that, then that means that it's a failure. That is what I think.
Marjane Satrapi
#57. 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
#58. 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?
Marjane Satrapi
#59. I have always thought that if women's hair posed so many problems, God would certainly have made us bald.
Marjane Satrapi
#60. I don't like the word 'autobiography.' I rather like the term 'autofiction.' The second you make a script out of the story of your life, it becomes fictional. Of course, the truth is never far. But the story is created out of it.
Marjane Satrapi
#61. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#62. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#63. To speak behind others' backs is the ventilator of the heart.
Marjane Satrapi
#64. Whether this tale be true or false, none can tell, for none were there to witness it themselves.
Marjane Satrapi
#65. I took three years of karate because of Bruce Lee, you know. I was a green belt.
Marjane Satrapi
#66. I don't want to quit smoking. I am convinced that if I quit smoking, the world would go to hell.
Marjane Satrapi
#67. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#69. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#70. 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
#72. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#73. 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
#74. As a director, you have to understand what is happening - if I don't understand it, you can't make changes.
Marjane Satrapi
#75. It's fear that makes us lose our conscience. It's also what transforms us into cowards.
Marjane Satrapi
#76. I realized then that I didn't understand anything. I read all the books I could.
Marjane Satrapi
#77. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#78. You never have these moments that, you know, are always perfect. Always something happens.
Marjane Satrapi
#79. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#80. Adaptation of books is never a success. When the author wants to make it, it's even worse.
Marjane Satrapi
#81. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#82. 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
#83. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#84. Nothing's worse than saying goodbye. It's a little like dying.
Marjane Satrapi
#85. 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!'
Marjane Satrapi
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#90. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#91. 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
#93. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#94. 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
#95. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#96. They found records and video-cassettes at their place, a deck of cards, a chess set. In other words, everything that's banned.
Marjane Satrapi
#97. I had this fantasy that in a democracy the government was the population. So I came to America and got a big slap in my face ... Americans were not what I thought. I thought I was going to see bastards and I saw nice people, very friendly to me.
Marjane Satrapi
#98. 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.
Marjane Satrapi
#99. Today, we don't talk about history. The past is two weeks ago, and the future is two weeks after.
Marjane Satrapi
#100. Politicians think they have answers for everything. We artists, we only have questions.
Marjane Satrapi
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