Marjane Satrapi

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.