Top 180 Marjane Satrapi Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “I have always thought that if women’s hair posed so many problems, God would certainly have made us bald.”

— Marjane Satrapi

53. “The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins, that I was playing a game by somebody else’s rules.”

— Marjane Satrapi

54. “I wanted to be an educated, liberated woman. And if the pursuit of knowledge meant getting cancer, so be it.”

— Marjane Satrapi

55. “I don’t want to quit smoking. I am convinced that if I quit smoking, the world would go to hell.”

— Marjane Satrapi

56. “We can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable. Once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it.”

— Marjane Satrapi

57. “My mother was the favorite child of her parents. My father was the favorite child of his parents. The result of these two favorite children was me. And I am an only child. So I was convinced that I was the center of the universe.”

— Marjane Satrapi

58. “The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing.”

— Marjane Satrapi

59. “Human beings have a lot of problems identifying themselves with other human beings who don’t resemble them exactly. But there’s something about drawing that means that anyone can identify to a drawing. I mean, people can identify themselves with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.”

— Marjane Satrapi

60. “And so I was lost, without any bearings... what could be worse than that?”

— Marjane Satrapi

61. “I finally understood what my grandmother meant. If I wasn’t comfortable with myself, I would never be comfortable.”

— Marjane Satrapi

62. “Teacher: What do you want to be when you grow up? Marji: I’ll be a prophet.”

— Marjane Satrapi

63. “Guns may shoot and knives may carve, but we won’t wear your silly scarves!”

— Marjane Satrapi

64. “Prosperity consists of two things: tea after a meal, and a cigarette after tea.”

— Marjane Satrapi

65. “Racism is not nearly as important as poverty. That’s the same around the world. What look like ethnic problems are really economic issues. If you look closely at all these conflicts around the world, they come down to poverty and economics and resources. The more poverty, the worse the war.”

— Marjane Satrapi

66. “The Germans sell chemical weapons to Iran and Iraq. The wounded are then sent to Germany to be treated. Veritable human guinea pigs.”

— Marjane Satrapi

67. “Here’s the problem: the description of the world is always reduced to yes or no, black or white. Superficial stories. Superhero stories. One side is the good one. The other one is evil.”

— Marjane Satrapi

68. “I’m someone who lived in a war for five years. I received bombs on my head every day of my childhood. Did that stop me from living? Did that stop me from laughing?”

— Marjane Satrapi

69. “There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don’t. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.”

— Marjane Satrapi

70. “To educate myself, I had to understand everything. Starting with myself, me, Marji, the woman.”

— Marjane Satrapi

71. “I don’t like the word ‘autobiography.’ I rather like the term ‘autofiction.’ The second you make a script out of the story of your life, it becomes fictional. Of course, the truth is never far. But the story is created out of it.”

— Marjane Satrapi

72. “Maybe the biggest problem is that there’s no empathy. Nobody puts themselves in the place of others. Everyone thinks they are the only one to suffer. Or that they’re the only ones who like ice cream or take their kids on vacation.”

— Marjane Satrapi

73. “With this first cigarette, I kissed childhood goodbye. Now I was a grown-up.”

— Marjane Satrapi

74. “In any case, it’s the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!”

— Marjane Satrapi

75. “For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.”

— Marjane Satrapi

76. “Is religion defending our physical integrity or is it just opposed to fashion?”

— Marjane Satrapi

77. “My culture comes from everywhere. I’m sick of this notion of nationality, that if you’re brought up in the same city or same country you’re the same. Even three kids brought up in the same family with the same genes, they are not the same. Just consider a human a human.”

— Marjane Satrapi

78. “For a revolution to succeed, the entire population must support it.”

— Marjane Satrapi

79. “I’m happy to see you so well-settled here. Now you must make an effort, you must become somebody. I don’t care what you do later, only try to be the best. Even if you become a cabaret dance, better that you dance at the lido than in a hole in the wall.”

— Marjane Satrapi

80. “I have been brought up open-minded. If I didn’t know any people from other countries, I’d think everyone was evil based on news stories. But I know a lot of people, and know that there is no such thing as stark good and evil. Isn’t it possible there is the same amount of evil everywhere?”

— Marjane Satrapi

81. “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.”

— Marjane Satrapi

82. “I am very bad at computers. I don’t really know how to write email.”

— Marjane Satrapi

83. “You draw the character from all angles – side, profile, back, etc. so the animator has this character in all the ways it looks like.”

— Marjane Satrapi

84. “I’m a very individualistic person. That is why I don’t belong to any political party or anything. I really believe in justice and freedom.”

— Marjane Satrapi

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

— Marjane Satrapi

86. “I wanted to die. Where were my parents to take me in their arms, to reassure me?”

— Marjane Satrapi

87. “Drawing – it’s the first language of human beings, before writing, before even talking, before words, human beings was drawing.”

— Marjane Satrapi

88. “One must educate oneself.”

— Marjane Satrapi

89. “I don’t believe in the clash of cultures. The culture is one. The culture is a ring off the same chain. Picasso was very much influenced by the African arts, and he influenced a whole other generation of artists. So everything influences everything.”

— Marjane Satrapi

90. “If it’s a good work of adaptation, the book should remain a book and the film should remain a film, and you should not necessarily read the book to see the film. If you do need that, then that means that it’s a failure. That is what I think.”

— Marjane Satrapi

91. “I was in love with Darth Vader. He was extremely sexy to me. Once I had almost a sexual dream about Darth Vader. At the moment he was about to pull his helmet off, my husband woke me up and I was so annoyed. I told him, “I was on my way to kiss Darth Vader.””

— Marjane Satrapi

92. “Hunger eats civilization. The West is not hungry; that’s why they can say they’re so civilized. Civilization is the biggest bluff!”

— Marjane Satrapi

93. “Oh my!! How you’ve grown. Soon you’ll be catching the Lord’s balls.”

— Marjane Satrapi

94. “Night brings good counsel”, my grandmother always told me.”

— Marjane Satrapi

95. “It’s always extremely interesting to speak at colleges. My books are taught in many colleges in America and are part of the educational system, so it’s really important to me. I don’t believe in so many things in life, but something I believe in is education.”

— Marjane Satrapi

96. “What do you want me to say, sir? That I’m the vegetable that I refused to become, that I’m so disappointed in myself that I can no longee look at myself in the mirror? That I hate myself?”

— Marjane Satrapi

97. “I love the French for their sarcasm, their irony. I love them for their bad moods.”

— Marjane Satrapi

98. “My natural optimism just leads me to be skeptical.”

— Marjane Satrapi

99. “I call Iran home because no matter how long I live in France, and despite the fact that I feel also French after all these years, to me the word ‘home’ has only one meaning: Iran. I suppose it’s that way for everyone: Home is the place where one is born and raised.”

— Marjane Satrapi

100. “Comics are just another medium to express yourself. It’s not cinema; it’s not literature; it’s just something else. It has a specific requirement, which is that images are used to tell the story. There are lots of crappy movies, with guns and action and Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever.”

— Marjane Satrapi