Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.

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.

There's this scene in "The Night of the Hunter" when the kids are downstairs, and you have the feeling that they're both in a room and at the same time it looks remote. And you wonder, How can you give the effect of both "inside" and "outside" at the same time. And you realize, by watching it many times, that around the scene there's this black edging.

It's cinematographic to smoke. Imagine Lauren Bacall without a cigarette.

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.

The most natural thing for us is drawing. The characters [in Persepolis] are hand drawn. We're not technical people. We don't know how to type.

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