This quote loses a little something when you’re not hearing it in Marjane Satrapi’s beautiful voice, but I still needed to share it. You can listen to the interview here:

http://www.npr.org/2012/08/18/158941794/marjane-satrapi-a-real-love-story-has-to-finish-bad

On “nursing hurt” and the role of suffering in art:

“Listen, to tell you the truth, I don’t think that you need a huge amount of [suffering], because if you suffer too much, normally you finish in the mental hospital. But at the same time, I have to say that sometimes — rarely, but sometimes — it happens to me that I wake up in the morning, I look at myself in the mirror, I think that I’m very beautiful. You know, the sun is shining, I’m very, very happy. This day, it’s impossible that I go to my studio and I draw and I write something. This day, I go out, I buy myself a dress, I call my friends, I have some pina colada, I never create. If we were very happy we would be like cats — we would lick ourselves and then sleep and eat and probably we would be much happier. But we would be cats.”