Top 100 Abbas Kiarostami Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In order to be universal, you have to be rooted in your own culture.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

2. “In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

3. “The one-word cinema wasn’t possible for me anymore. I’d hit a wall, a dead end. Therefore I thought I’d turn back.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

4. “I have no advice for anyone on how to live.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

5. “My car is my best friend. My office. My home. My location. I have a very intimate sense when I am in a car with someone next to me. We’re in the most comfortable seats because we’re not facing each other, but sitting side by side.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

6. “I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it’s inside a frame.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

7. “Close-Up is a very particular film in my oeuvre. It’s a film that was made in a very particular way; mainly because I didn’t really have the time to think about how to go about making the film.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

8. “Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, ‘Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.’ That’s not valid for people who want to think and reflect.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

9. “Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

10. “I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

11. “The experience of life teaches us that being like someone in love is more real, because everything is uncertain.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

12. “My way of expression is full of complications and mystery because that’s my perception of life.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

13. “I never really learned photography.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

14. “I think violence can never be justified.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

15. “Good cinema is what we can believe and bad cinema is what we can’t believe. What you see and believe in is very much what I’m interested in.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

16. “When I talk to some of the younger filmmakers, they are so worried about their films that, eventually, this state of being worried reflects itself in and helps the final work. Whereas, with projects that are meticulously planned, you look at the end result and it is full of emptiness.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

17. “It’s not so much a question of whether we’ve shot it through 35mm or digital video; what is important is whether the audience accepts it as real.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

18. “A work of art doesn’t exist outside the perception of the audience.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

19. “Children are very strong and independent characters and can come up with more interesting things than Marlon Brando, and it’s sometimes very difficult to direct or order them to do something.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

20. “There are certainties in existence, but love is something much harder to define than light and dark, life and death. I think saying you are “like” someone in love sounds right.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

21. “As film-makers, it is very important for us to find common ground between cultures, and maybe that’s less the case for politicians who benefit more from finding the conflicts and differences between us.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

22. “Close-Up has affected later films that I’ve made.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

23. “This kind of directing, I think, is very similar to being a football coach. You prepare your players and place them in the right places, but once the game is on, there’s nothing much you can do – you can smoke a cigarette or get nervous, but you can’t do much.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

24. “In my opinion the man looks at the relationship in a more bitter fashion and the woman still holds great hopes.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

25. “Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

26. “It’s true that the best way of knowing yourself is to put yourself into different situations.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

27. “Film is very much a universal and common voice, and we can’t limit it to one particular culture.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

28. “This concept that you refer to in Buddhism is something I’ve been nurtured with through the history of my country for 700, 800 years – Persian poets and philosophers haven’t said anything different with regard to experiencing life in the moment, as opposed to the belief of permanence.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

29. “There were years when Hitchcock was like a master to me, but now I think he’s so artificial. I can watch films and say how technically beautiful they are, but I’m not impressed by any technicality.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

30. “I think life is so difficult to catch, it’s so furtive, that a copy, a film, can in no way catch it and represent it.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

31. “While shooting Ten I was sitting in the backseat, but I didn’t interfere. Sometimes, I was following in another car, so I was not even present on the “set”, because I thought they would work better in my absence.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

32. “Directors don’t always create, they can also destroy with too many demands.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

33. “The only thing that I can do is hold a mirror in front of men and women, in front of the viewer in the theater, to reflect. There is nothing but reflection that I could intend to offer the viewer of the film.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

34. “I believe there’s only good cinema and bad cinema.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

35. “A movie is about human beings, about humanity.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

36. “I only make notes, I don’t write dialogues in full. And the notes are very much based on my knowledge of person.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

37. “I never reflect or convey that which I have not experienced myself.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

38. “Of the hundreds of points to enter and exit that are offered to me, I have to choose the one that I feel is the least wrong, the least fake. It is fake, it is a moment that I choose to erupt the story, but I make it as smooth as I can. What enables me to do it is the skill of filmmaking.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

39. “My films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism, even though it was never intended. Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

40. “When I find the character, I try to spend time with them and get to know them very well. Therefore my notes are not from the character that I had in my mind before, but are instead based on the people I’ve met in real life.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

41. “When we start shooting I don’t have rehearsals with characters at all. So, rather than pulling them towards myself, I travel closer to them; it’s very much closer to the real person than anything I try to create. So I give them something but I also take from them.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

42. “Anything I’ve not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

43. “People have curiosity, they have intelligence, they have interest in understanding their peers. But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people’s minds to lazy minds.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

44. “I thought that I had been asked every kind of question possible.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

45. “Art is the experience of what you’ve felt inside.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

46. “It is a very important film, Life And Nothing More, in that what was filmed was inspired by a journey I had made just three days after an earthquake. And I speak not only of the film itself but also of the experience of being in that place, where only three days before 50,000 people had died.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

47. “The day we run out of petrol is the day Iran will be free.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

48. “I really think that I don’t mind people sleeping during my films, because I know that some very good films might prepare you for sleeping or falling asleep or snoozing. It’s not to be taken badly at all.”

— Abbas Kiarostami

49. “When I met Akira Kurosawa in Japan, one question he asked me was, “How did you actually make the children act the way they do? I do have children in my films but I find that I reduce and reduce their presence until I have to get rid of them because there’s no way that I can direct them.””

— Abbas Kiarostami

50. “I think being someone in love is so hard to define, so temporary, because retrospectively we often deny the state in which we were in love.”

— Abbas Kiarostami