“I had this fantasy that in a democracy the government was the population. So I c…” — 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.