Marjane Satrapi Quotes
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I like to be sad once in a while. You need it for your equilibrium.
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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.
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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!'
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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.
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If today I have to make a political statement, it is, 'I love beauty.' I think beauty makes people better.
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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.
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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.
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For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.
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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.
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I wasn't made to take orders. My grandmother used to tell me: 'Laws are for idiots.' She was right.
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It's cinematographic to smoke. Imagine Lauren Bacall without a cigarette.
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I don't make a career plan. I take things the way they come.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's true that, in Iran, women have half of the rights men do. And yet 66 per cent of students are women.
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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.
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I am very bad at computers. I don't really know how to write email.
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I don't think of myself as a rebel; I just say what I think.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.