Marjane Satrapi Quotes

In film, you have the luxury of accomplishing what you need in 24 frames every second. Comics, you only have five or six panels a page to do that.

Comics is a language. It's a language most people understand intuitively.

The real power of comics is writing as you draw.

Comics don't work without the visuals, obviously.

Writing a graphic novel is hard. It feels closer to a screen play than to a novel.

I think the graphic novel form works, in practice, a lot differently from watching a movie. You can put it down and pick it back up whenever you want - something you can't do in a theater.

You have to think about space differently; you have to think about time differently when you're talking about a graphic novel versus a movie.

Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium.

When I put together a graphic novel, I don't think about literary prose. I think about storytelling.

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

Some graphic narrative art presses against the panel: you wrestle with it at the level of the paper.

My overall artistic goal is to marry graphic design with comic books and traditional storytelling.

But with comics you're reading and assimilating an image simultaneously, instead of just reading or watching the tube.

“One picture is worth a thousand words,” said an ancient Chinese; but it may take ten thousand words to validate it.

I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel. How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.

I fell in love with film and its potential. The idea of putting one image next to another image and creating meaning blew my mind.

Comics are a wonderful form. You can do so much with it.

Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.

I don't use film in the way that the great auteurs do. I use film, the camera, to record as effectively and as perceptive as I am able what I want to say through the actors.

I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.

I would love to do a full-scale graphic novel.

I've said this before, but I don't like putting captions in my comic books. I feel, for me, they become a crutch, a way to ignore the essential fact that our medium is a visual medium, and the greatest pleasures to be derived from comics are how stories can be told with pictures.

The graphic novel is a great form that can be used to marry the book format with the movie.

As a cinematographer, I was always attracted to stories that have the potential to be told with as few words as possible.