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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Marjane Satrapi Quotes

I don’t watch many comic-book movies. But I loved ‘Sin City.’

– Marjane Satrapi

I don’t consider myself as a feminist but more a humanist.

– Marjane Satrapi

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

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.

– Marjane Satrapi

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

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

It’s true that, in Iran, women have half of the rights men do. And yet 66 per cent of students are women.

– Marjane Satrapi

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

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

Image is an international language.

– Marjane Satrapi

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

When you make a book or you make a movie, it is almost like hitting on somebody. It’s not because you want to seduce people that you will seduce them; you can hit on somebody and it doesn’t work. But when you hit on them and it works, then it’s really cool.

– Marjane Satrapi

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

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

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.

– Marjane Satrapi

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

I don’t think of myself as a rebel; I just say what I think.

– Marjane Satrapi

I don’t make a career plan. I take things the way they come.

– Marjane Satrapi

If today I have to make a political statement, it is, ‘I love beauty.’ I think beauty makes people better.

– Marjane Satrapi

The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.

– Marjane Satrapi

My point of view when I make a book or I make a movie is to see the humanistic point of view. The point of view of the daily life of normal people.

– Marjane Satrapi

That’s the story of life – when you start enjoying people, it’s always too late.

– Marjane Satrapi

I don’t want to quit smoking. I am convinced that if I quit smoking, the world would go to hell.

– Marjane Satrapi

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

You hear people saying, ‘Oh I’m so tired, I’ve had enough of Cannes.’ How can you have enough of Cannes? It’s just the best place to be, like a fairytale.

– Marjane Satrapi

Cinema is a world of imagination.

– Marjane Satrapi

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

I am very bad at computers. I don’t really know how to write email.

– Marjane Satrapi

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

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.

– Marjane Satrapi

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