Marjane Satrapi (Persian: مرجان ساتراپی) (born 22 November 1969) is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, film director, and children's book author.
The Germans sell chemical weapons to Iran and Iraq. The wounded are then sent to Germany to be treated. Veritable human guinea pigs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's cinematographic to smoke. Imagine Lauren Bacall without a cigarette.
Nothing's worse than saying goodbye. It's a little like dying.
The language in a comic book or a graphic novel and the cinematographic language are really not the same language. They are false brother and sister. It's not at all the same.
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.
A real love story has to finish bad. That is what I think.
Image is an international language.
All big changes of the world come from 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.
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.
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.
Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that's why they can say they're so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!
In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!
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.
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.
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.