Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life.

Good cinema is what we can believe, and bad cinema is what we can't believe.

Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time.

I film normal-life subjects in natural settings that some people would consider uncinematic. But what I want to show is nature itself, as the truth of life.

Before the revolution we had 300 for six million people in Tehran, but now we have less than 200 for 16 million people.

Whenever people ask me what the story is for my next film, I won't tell and people feel it's because I'm being secretive or something, but it's actually because I'm ashamed to sum up a film in three sentences.