Image is an international language.

I became the voice of a generation in a very surprising way, because many Iranians recognize themselves in it. But that is not what I wanted.

When you say 'revolution' when you have only men outside, you know that something is going wrong. I'm not like a hardcore feminist, but I think that one of the things that makes the society advanced is equality between men and women. If half of the society is oppressed by the other half, it's not fine.

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.

Not everybody loves their children. If that was a fact, all the children would be happy and they would make happy adults. Instead, we have lots of miserable children that later became miserable adults. This is a fact. We cannot change that.

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.

Anything that has a relationship with pleasure we reject it. Eating, they talk about cholesterol; making love, they talk about Aids; you talk about smoking, they talk about cancer. It's a very sick society that rejects pleasure.