Marjane Satrapi Quotes

If life is a blank canvas and all people are artists, the big challenge we all face may be expressed this way: Will we ultimately produce something approaching a masterpiece, an acceptable but not particularly memorable work of art, or a creation that wouldn't even be purchased at a yard sale?

You were born with the seeds of your talent, the ability to observe the world around you and weave piece of it into a story. I believe that most -- if not all -- people are born with these seeds. What separates the writers from the non-writers is that the writers actually sit down and, you know... write.

I felt like I was a writer, and I just thought filmmaking was the best way for me to express that, because it allows me to embrace the visual world that I love. It's allows me to interact with people, to be more social than fiction or poetry, and it felt like the right way for me to tell the stories that felt pressing to me.

Many people have a novel inside them, but most don't bother to get it out.

When I discovered that I could write music, it felt like the most natural way for me to connect with people and tell my stories. I've always thought of that as what I do: I tell stories.

I believe rock can do anything, it's the ultimate vehicle for everything

Comics are just another medium to express yourself. It's not cinema; it's not literature; it's just something else. It has a specific requirement, which is that images are used to tell the story. There are lots of crappy movies, with guns and action and Arnold Schwarzenegger or whatever.

You see a picture and you understand perfectly, immediately, the basic thing that's happening. It's probably more accessible because we are in a culture of images. People are used to seeing stories that way. They understand looking at pictures.

For me it's always been about the stories, not what medium. The medium is secondary to the stories.

Movies are the greatest art form the world has come up with yet. If you don't use them to the full extent and you don't give people as much as you possibly can, you're doing a disservice to it.

What works in one medium does not necessarily always work in the other.

The growing pains of being an actor, that was a little frustrating at times because you feel like you have great capacity to do many things. And yet there seems to be a misunderstanding about who you are and what you're trying to do. And that requires patience, and people eventually will understand.

Today's work, I don't know it just doesn't make sense, a lot of it. It's just guns and sex and more guns and more sex. You say to yourself, when the hell are you gonna get down to the nitty-gritty and do something good so people can be entertained? I mean if they call this entertainment.

We [with Neal Dodson and Corey Moosa] wanted to draw people in with a dialogue - whether it's a creative process or a social issue or innovation of some kind; whether it was how we told the stories or what stories we told. We produced some online videos.

I think cinema is better today that you can be more daring with what you do. If you do it well. With that comes a responsibility not to bore people with vulgarity and all that stuff. To know how to do it right, know how to lay it out there.

I am more of a visual person than a verbal person. For me, I think, the excitement is the fact that I found a way of telling the story as I want to tell it, in a medium that I could master.

There is no such thing as creative and non-creative people, only people who use their creativity and people who don't.

Very few people are accepted as creative: A few painters, a few poets - one in a million. This is foolish! Every human being is a born creator. Watch children and you will see: all children are creative. By and by, we destroy their creativity.

Everybody's an artist. Unfortunately we don't treat them as such.

I'm just always making things that are personal but hopefully also inspiring, and share not just my story, but other people's stories.

The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.

Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.

I'm not an activist at all. I'm a filmmaker, and I wanted the people involved to tell their own story.

[My stories were] an excuse for making pictures.

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.