Artist

I'm not a religious person at all.

The real war is not between the West and the East. The real war is between intelligent and stupid people.

For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.

I think animation is like running a marathon, and making a movie is like a 100 meter sprint. The question is: are you a marathon man or are you a sprinter? I realized that I was more of a sprinter than a marathon man. With a long, long project, I get bored easily.

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

All big changes of the world come from words.

It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name, that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.

Americans think cinema is about storytelling; I don't believe that. I think it's a language and everyone has to find their own way of speaking. It's not so much what you say as the way you say it.

Revolutions just spread blood. Evolution - this is something that changes in the long term.

I don't watch many comic-book movies. But I loved 'Sin City.'

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 am very bad at computers. I don't really know how to write email.

I like to be sad once in a while. You need it for your equilibrium.

Smoking kills you, but life kills you, and if you don't want to die, go into a freezer when you are born and nothing will happen to you.

If people are given the chance to experience life in more than one country, they will hate a little less. It's not a miracle potion, but little by little you can solve problems in the basement of a country, not on the surface.

The best thing I ever did in my life was to ask, 'Do I like everybody?' And the answer was, 'No.' So why should everybody like me? If people are against me, so what? I'm against them too.

If the majority of people were right, we'd be living in paradise. But we are not living in paradise, we are living in hell. What does it mean? That means the majority of people are wrong. So I never believed what people told me.

I think that all stories - if you make movies about zombies and aliens - it has always to do with your personal story. If not directly, it is about your fears, your obsessions, things like that.

I hate this word 'graphic novel.' It is a term publishing houses have created for the bourgeois so they wouldn't be ashamed of buying comics... I'm not a graphic novelist. I am a cartoonist and I make comics and I am very happy about it.

I'm not a very good financing person. I don't even know how much money I have in my bank account. I never have opened one single envelope from the bank - they freak me out.