“When you take a tree that is rooted in the ground, and transfer it from one place to another, the tree will no longer bear fruit.”

I remember when I came out of an exam thinking I had done well and then I had a clue that maybe one answer was wrong, I remembered that I rather stop knowing, stop thinking about it, appreciating life instead.

Unfortunately, cinema critics are very few in America, 400-500 people, but there are more critics of Iran.

I don’t generally derive my stories from novels. I try to turn into film things I have felt or experienced.

Whether you consider me a master filmmaker or not, I do it with my intuition and my vision, my experience as a storyteller.

I didn’t just see myself as a film director here [in Life And Nothing More], but also as an observer of people who had been condemned to death.

I think being someone in love is so hard to define, so temporary, because retrospectively we often deny the state in which we were in love.

Close-Up has affected later films that I’ve made.

I was mentioning with the digital camera, maybe this new fashion of filmmaking gives a closer look of what life may be like. But it’s still nothing but a copy.

I think it was [Jean-Luc] Godard who said that life is nothing but a bad copy of film, but then our ambition must be to make better films and better shapes of forms that are given in life.

If I do continue to have the opportunity to work in Iran, that’s very much what I’d prefer to do.

When I find the character, I try to spend time with them and get to know them very well. Therefore my notes are not from the character that I had in my mind before, but are instead based on the people I’ve met in real life.

In my films, I try to give people as little information as possible, which is still much more than what they get in real life. I feel that they should be grateful for the little bit of information I give them.

I’m not sure that my films show the reality of life in Iran; we show different aspects of life. Iran is a very extensive and expansive place, and sometimes, even for us who live there, some of the realities are very hard to comprehend.

I spend a lot of time doing carpentry. Sometimes there is nothing that gives me the contentment that sawing a piece of wood does.

People have curiosity, they have intelligence, they have interest in understanding their peers. But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people’s minds to lazy minds.

I do think that we are sometimes, as directors, guilty of portraying or asking our actors to behave in certain ways that are perhaps not very morally acceptable. I’m not the only one.

A truly obedient man does not discriminate between one thing and another, since his only aim is to execute faithfully whatever may be assigned to him.

He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man,

If we’re for one another, we’re feminists. The rest is semantics.

To go beyond the self, beyond even its most intimate union with God, and this is where we enter yet another new life- a life best categorized, perhaps, as a life without a self.

It takes a great deal of courage to follow another person’s lead.

I like being outdoors. I like to go cavorting in the nude in the forests. It is just another world. To take sunbaths in the nude.

The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.

What a great idea! Maybe, I could do the same thing with my music. Create a place where a kid off the street could walk in one door, an unknown, go through a process, and come out another door, a star.