Marjane Satrapi People Quotations

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.

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.

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.

People, they think that animation is a style. Animation is just a technique. It's like, people, they think that comics is a style, like comics is a superhero story. Comic is just a narration, and is a medium, you can say any kind of story in comics and you can say of any kind of story in animation.

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

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.

In the West, people don't have any real problems. It's all based on bad conscience, a very Christian notion. I don't have any bad conscience. If there's a God that created us, if I am bad, it's his fault.

If the majority of people were right, we'd be living in paradise. But we are not living in paradise, we are living in hell. What does it mean? That means the majority of people are wrong. So I never believed what people told me.

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.

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.

You see a picture and you understand perfectly, immediately, the basic thing that's happening. It's probably more accessible because we are in a culture of images. People are used to seeing stories that way. They understand looking at pictures.

George W.Bush can go and kill thousands of Iraqis every day. By making people believe they are the enemy, and not human beings any more. If evil has an address, a nationality, you can exterminate all of them. This is fascism.

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.

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.

In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!

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

I chose the actors that I was in love with. I cannot work with people that I don't personally like a lot. They can be the best actor in the world, but if the first contact is not good, if I don't fall in love with them, then I don't want to work with them. It's impossible.

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.

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.

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.

The best thing I ever did in my life was to ask, 'Do I like everybody?' And the answer was, 'No.' So why should everybody like me? If people are against me, so what? I'm against them too.

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.