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.

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.

Business is very personal. For me, everything is extremely personal. With actors, the fact that I write helps, because when you say to an actor "Oh I want you to do it a little bit more ...," without saying what you want more of, then the actor doesn't know what to do. But if you can put into words exactly what you want, then the experience of writing is helpful with that.

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

I'm not a politician. I don't know how to solve the problems of the world. But as an artist, I have one duty: to ask questions.

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.

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