Cancer Sticks for the Soul

Nerve interviews Iranian graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi on her latest book, Sophia Loren's rack, and the spiritual depth of smokers:

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.

Charles Freund reviewed Satrapi's subversive Persepolis back in '03.