I almost don't know how to write an email.

As a director, you have to understand what is happening - if I don't understand it, you can't make changes.

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

I don't like 'graphic novel.' It's a word that publishers created for the bourgeois to read comics without feeling bad. Comics is just a way of narrating - it's just a media type.

I'd heard so many stupidities about my country since I left Iran. People had watched this stupid movie Not Without My Daughter [in which Sally Field plays an American who rescues her daughter from her estranged in-laws in Iran]; I heard so many things like that. I did not make Persepolis for Iranians. It was my answer to the rest of the world, to say, "Let me give you another point of view."

I wanted to make a real love story with a bad ending, because a love story that ends good is the life of everyone - you and I, for example. 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.

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