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.
You cannot be completely nice. It's impossible. Who is it? Who is the perfect guy? Show him to me! It doesn't exist. And thank god.
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.
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.
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 wanted to make a real love story with a bad ending, because a love story that ends good is the life of everyone. 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.
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.
I wasn't made to take orders. My grandmother used to tell me: 'Laws are for idiots. ' She was right.
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.
Revolutions just spread blood. Evolution - this is something that changes in the long term.
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 Germans sell chemical weapons to Iran and Iraq. The wounded are then sent to Germany to be treated. Veritable human guinea pigs.
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.
The world is not about Batman and Robin fighting the Joker; things are more complicated than that. And nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.
There's this scene in "The Night of the Hunter" when the kids are downstairs, and you have the feeling that they're both in a room and at the same time it looks remote. And you wonder, How can you give the effect of both "inside" and "outside" at the same time. And you realize, by watching it many times, that around the scene there's this black edging.
Life is absolutely unbearable. And we're going to die.
All big changes of the world come from words.
Here's the problem: the description of the world is always reduced to yes or no, black or white. Superficial stories. Superhero stories. One side is the good one. The other one is evil.
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.