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.
Interpretation
As an artist, my role is to provoke thought and inquiry rather than provide solutions to societal issues.
Marjane Satrapi highlights the unique position of artists in society. Instead of presenting concrete solutions to complex global problems, artists are tasked with the responsibility of raising pertinent questions that challenge perspectives and inspire dialogue. Art serves as a medium for exploration and reflection, allowing audiences to engage with the dilemmas of the world through inquiry rather than prescriptive answers.
In practice
In a speech at an art exhibition, one might reference this quote to emphasize the power of art in fostering critical thinking.
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.
If it's a good work of adaptation, the book should remain a book and the film should remain a film, and you should not necessarily read the book to see the film. If you do need that, then that means that it's a failure. That is what I think.
I'm not a politician because I'm an artist. Politicians have a very easy answer for a very complicated question. I have a very complicated question for what you consider very easy situations.
For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.
My mother always told me I had to do 100 times better than a man. I had to work hard at maths, and learn four languages.
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.
Dancing insists we take up space, and though it has no set direction, we go there together. Dance is dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive, and contagious and it breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere, at anytime, with anyone and everyone, and it's free. Dance joins us and pushes us to go further and that is why it's at the center of ONE BILLION RISING.
An awful lot of storytelling isn't really about making people understand - it's about making people care.
I tend to like strong female characters. It just interests me dramatically. A strong male character isn't interesting because it has been done and it's so cliched. A weak male character is interesting: somebody else hasn't done it a hundred times. A strong female character is still interesting to me because it hasn't been done all that much, finding the balance of femininity and strength. [From a 1986 Fangoria interview]
And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I'm going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I'm going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.
I spent a whole summer working on what proved to be 'A Game of Thrones'.
You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits.
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