I remember I went to an exhibition somewhere and one of the artists, an Iranian lady, said, "I wish we had somewhere that our paintings would stay forever." So this idea came to me. I said, "She's right, we should have a place to keep them, and not only Iranian art works, but also of foreign artists."

There are many Iranians working at NASA. One of the engineers involved with the spaceship that went to Mars is an Iranian.

You cannot expect a foreign country to be more Catholic than the pope for you.

There are many people inside Iran who say, "We don't have enough to eat. Why do we need a nuclear bomb?"

I was never interested in money. I always looked down on it. But now that I have less money, I see that without money, you cannot do much. Everything in the end is about money.

It's normal that countries work for their own benefit, political and economic.

In Iran, as in all developing countries, they wanted to copy the outside world, without knowing what was good for our own country.