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.
Dill was off again. Beautiful things floated around in his dreamy head. He could read two books to my one, but he preferred the magic of his own inventions. He could add and subtract faster than lightning, but he preferred his own twilight world, a world where babies slept, waiting to be gathered like morning lilies.
The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.
I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.
I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there's something very satisfying about putting it into words. Certainly it's not something that you're in charge of, necessarily, but writing about it, putting it into your words, can be a very powerful experience.
Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.
I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic, there's a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can't exist without it.
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