Top 180 Marjane Satrapi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.”

— Marjane Satrapi

2. “Nothing’s worse than saying goodbye. It’s a little like dying.”

— Marjane Satrapi

Featured in: Goodbye Quotes

3. “Drawing is the first language of the human being before writing. It’s a transcription of how the human being sees reality, not reality itself.”

— Marjane Satrapi

4. “Once again, I arrived at my usual conclusion: one must educate oneself.”

— Marjane Satrapi

5. “Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.”

— Marjane Satrapi

6. “Things always happen when you least expect it.”

— Marjane Satrapi

7. “All big changes of the world come from words.”

— Marjane Satrapi

8. “One can forgive but one should never forget.”

— Marjane Satrapi

9. “In every religion, you find the same extremists.”

— Marjane Satrapi

10. “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

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

— Marjane Satrapi

12. “I have my dark side. You have your dark side. From the second that we have a brain, there are things that are not right – we are human beings with all these illusions and complexes and everything. That’s attractive to me.”

— Marjane Satrapi

13. “I realized then that I didn’t understand anything. I read all the books I could.”

— Marjane Satrapi

14. “Culture and education are the lethal weapons against all kinds of fundamentalism.”

— Marjane Satrapi

15. “I respect humanity. That’s my religion. I can’t stand these religions that are really businesses. So much money everywhere that’s going to buy a really nice house in heaven – or what? I don’t get it.”

— Marjane Satrapi

16. “You know, they say in France that translation is like a woman: she is either beautiful or faithful.”

— Marjane Satrapi

17. “Life is absolutely unbearable. And we’re going to die.”

— Marjane Satrapi

18. “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.”

— Marjane Satrapi

19. “A real love story has to finish bad. That is what I think.”

— Marjane Satrapi

20. “This clash of the culture, East and the West, us and them, Muslim and Christian, does not exist.”

— Marjane Satrapi

21. “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.”

— Marjane Satrapi

22. “I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn’t even know anymore why I was living.”

— Marjane Satrapi

23. “Listen. I don’t like to preach, but here’s some advice. You’ll meet a lot of jerks in life. If they hurt you, remember it’s because they’re stupid. Don’t react to their cruelty. There’s nothing worse than bitterness and revenge. Keep your dignity and be true to yourself.”

— Marjane Satrapi

24. “The revolution is like a bicycle. When the wheels don’t turn, it falls.”

— Marjane Satrapi

25. “We were not in the same social class but at least we were at the same bed.”

— Marjane Satrapi

26. “It’s fear that makes us lose our conscience. It’s also what transforms us into cowards.”

— Marjane Satrapi

27. “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.”

— Marjane Satrapi

28. “I wanted to make a real love story with a bad ending, because a love story that ends good is the life of everyone. I always say to people, You know, if Romeo and Juliet got married, nobody would care about them. Imagine Romeo and Juliet, six kids yelling, mama, mama, papa, papa.”

— Marjane Satrapi

29. “I want to be justice, love and the wrath of God all in one.”

— Marjane Satrapi

30. “I think animation is like running a marathon, and making a movie is like a 100 meter sprint. The question is: are you a marathon man or are you a sprinter? I realized that I was more of a sprinter than a marathon man. With a long, long project, I get bored easily.”

— Marjane Satrapi

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

— Marjane Satrapi

32. “Life hangs from so slender a thread. Life is but a sigh...”

— Marjane Satrapi

33. “Cinema is a world of imagination.”

— Marjane Satrapi

34. “Evil is international and the fanatic is international and universal. There is no difference between a Muslim fanatic, a Christian fanatic, even a secular fanatic.”

— Marjane Satrapi

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

— Marjane Satrapi

36. “Third: live together as long as you feel truly happy. Life is too short to be lived badly.”

— Marjane Satrapi

37. “One isn’t born courageous, one becomes it.”

— Marjane Satrapi

38. “I wasn’t made to take orders. My grandmother used to tell me: ‘Laws are for idiots.’ She was right.”

— Marjane Satrapi

39. “I’m extremely unbearable. You know, I’m narcissistic and at the same time I’m very charming – I think.”

— Marjane Satrapi

40. “My real background was in art studies. At the beginning I was a painter, then I was this graphic designer, then I became an illustrator, then I was a comic artist. But for me it’s a different way of expression, a different field of art. They’re not separated; everything for me is related.”

— Marjane Satrapi

41. “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

42. “Marriage, it’s like roulette: Sometimes one wins, often one loses. Even if you’re very in love, it can still go bad.”

— Marjane Satrapi

43. “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

44. “You must base everything on these three rules: behave well, speak well, act well.”

— Marjane Satrapi

45. “I really didn’t know what to think about the veil. Deep down I was very religious but as a family we were very modern and avant-garde. I was born with religion. At the age of six I was already sure I was the last prophet. This was few years before the revolution.”

— Marjane Satrapi

46. “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.”

— Marjane Satrapi

47. “If hair is as stimulating as you say then you need to shave your mustache.”

— Marjane Satrapi

48. “In any case as long as there is oil in the middle east they will never have peace.”

— Marjane Satrapi

49. “To die a martyr is to inject blood into the veins of society.”

— Marjane Satrapi

50. “I had learned that you should always shout louder than your aggressor.”

— Marjane Satrapi