I love the idea that it doesn't take one person only to achieve your potential. It takes a village, it takes a community, a street, a teacher, a mother.
Life is short, so I'm knowing exactly where I'm putting my time. I don't want to do things that I don't have to do.
'No words - action' was the lesson my mother taught me: as artists, we have the privilege of holding a mirror to the world, to engage, to question, to bring beauty to a complex universe.
If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will.
We want the diversity of the world that is around us represented both in front of and behind the camera, and on our screens as a result.
Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place.
Never treat anything you do as a stepping stone. Do it fully, and follow it completely.
Marriage of attraction is a gamble anyway, so you might as well marry into a family that is similar to your own, and make that much less of an adjustment. But the 'love marriage', as it is called, is equally common in India now. But it would be interesting to do a comparison of what would work better. Marriage is hard work, and it is a gamble.
I'm inspired by people that are marginal. I'm excited by their resilience.
Post 9/11, so much has changed in New York that it does not give you that homely feeling which it did before.
I always like to reveal the fact that the emperor has no clothes. And children are best at that. They teach us how to see the world in that sense. They are without artifice; they see it for what it is. I am drawn to that ruthless honesty.
I often begin movies with music in my head; it's a very important dimension to me. Not just the music itself, but how to use music in film: when and how and subtlety. I don't like to be too sweet in my stories, and I like the abrasive clang, the contrasting of sounds and cultures.
The film-school mantra is that if you don't tell your own stories, nobody will.
You know, the sad thing of post-9/11, which was of course horrific, was that the city in which I felt completely at home for two decades, suddenly people like us - brown people - were looked at as the 'Others.'
I grew up thinking anything was possible simply because of seeing women in power - like, you know, running the country. Which is a thought that continues to give Americans indigestion... Direction is about having a vision, but the practice of being a director is a con game - a confidence game.
When people break up, after sharing their entire souls with each other, I don't want to believe that you just switch off. There are remnants of melancholia, and there is so much that stays with you because you loved this person. Of course, it's that much more complicated when it's an interracial love or love from a person from another culture.
I think there's a level of ignorance, when, in the callowness of youth, you imagine that you are inventing the world for the first time. You imagine that your parents don't know what it feels like to fall in love.
Either you're this, or you're that: either you're - if you're a Pakistani, you're a terrorist; if you're an American, you might be a militarist. Those kind of prisms that we see each other through are really stultifying, and they don't often show the complexity and the incredible warmth and encompassing of the world.
It is shocking that the screen does not reflect the way the world is and the diversity in the world... What the world really looks like should be on screen, and it isn't.
In Uganda, I am surrounded, unfortunately, by evangelicals; I can't bear it. Every night I hear the chants of Baptists urging people to be born again.
