Abbas Kiarostami Quotes

My car's my best friend. My office. My home. My location. I have a very intimate sense when I am in a car with someone next to me. We're in the most comfortable seats because we're not facing each other, but sitting side by side. We don't look at each other, but instead do so only when we want to. We're allowed to look around without appearing rude. We have a big screen in front of us and side views. Silence doesn't seem heavy or difficult. Nobody serves anybody. And many other aspects. One most important thing is that it transports us from one place to another.

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

The best place for me is in my car, listening to my stereo. I am 'Mr. Karaoke Guy' in the car, completely. I just go with it and don't care what anyone else thinks - I'm singing, man!

I know I'm not supposed to like muscle cars, but I like muscle cars.

I definitely I prefer to sing in the car. I don't sing in the shower, maybe its because that's the one time I don't need to talk to anyone so I should just shut up, otherwise I'm just, you know, jibber jabber.

There is a silence, the child of love, which expresses everything, and proclaims more loudly than the tongue is able to do.

I sing in the car if I'm in LA, because you're like soundproofed.

Ten to 20 years out, driving your car will be viewed as equivalently immoral as smoking cigarettes around other people is today.

If people were really naked and everyone knew what each other was thinking, everyone would probably just laugh... or they'd lock each other up.

Can public men have private lives?

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

What's the big deal if I dress casually and dance in my backyard.

Silence is a way of saying: we do not have to entertain each other; we are okay as we are.

The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom.

For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn't mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song. The kind you hum without even knowing what it is or why you're humming it. The kind that you've always known.

Sir, when two people have the extraordinary quality of this state, words are not necessary. Where that quality of love exists, words become unnecessary. There is instant communication.

Among friends one has the privilege of saying nothing; the civility consists in the assumption that one's silence will be civilly understood. I can imagine a small gathering of friends who say nothing all evening: they recoil from saying anything that the others don't want to hear; and their silence would be the subtlest courtesy.

Public lives are lived out on the job and in the marketplace, where certain rules, conventions, laws, and social customs keep most of us in line. Private lives are lived out in the presence of family, friends, and neighbors who must be considered and respected even though the rules and proscriptions are looser than what's allowed in public. But in our secret lives, inside our own heads, almost anything goes.

True silence is the speech of lovers.

People take conventional ways that other people have always decorated their cars, and use them as ways of giving other people permission to approach them.

If you can sit in silence with a person for half an hour and yet be entirely comfortable, you and that person can be friends. If you cannot, friends you'll never be and you need not waste time in trying.

Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?

I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.

I repeat to you-my own view is, is that if a State-if people decide to-what they do in the privacy of their house, consenting adults should be able to do. This is America. It's a free society, but it doesn't mean we have to redefine traditional marriage.

I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.