Mais Marjane Satrapi

Trecho da entrevista com ela. Makes a lot of sense, eventhough I don't agree 100%

"You have these great, sensual descriptions of cigarette smoke in the book. One character calls cigarettes "food for the soul."

Cigarettes are food for the soul. When you're smoking you can actually watch yourself breathing, watch your soul getting out of your body and into your body. Two days ago I spoke in Barnes & Noble in Chelsea. I said that I wrote this book to rehabilitate smoking, and people just stopped laughing. People are willing to eat any bullshit and drink bad water; pollution doesn't bother them. But as soon as you take out a cigarette they act as if you're going to kill them. This is not true! All the shit that they put in the food, all these hormones and pesticides and what have you, the stress, the condition of life, all of that . . . Living kills you anyway.

What made you want to write this book now?

I love love-stories in general. I also love the idea of death, because I think that it is such a scandal that we have to die. We die for the same reason that a worm will die, or a cat will die, but with the difference that we are conscious of it. But the book is also about pleasure, from Sophia Loren, to smoke, to love — all of that. We are living in a world in which the notion of pleasure is completely rejected. As soon as you say smoke, they say cancer. You say eating, they say cholesterol. You say making love, they say AIDS. But before AIDS and cancer and cholesterol you had the pleasure of doing these things. I think this rejection of pleasure is the basis of much of the fanaticism we see now. People are frustrated from lack of pleasure. If they had pleasure, why would they go and kill other people? They wouldn't. "