I've loved 'Vanity Fair' since I was 16 years old. You know, we're all colonial hangovers in India, steeped in English literature. It is one of these novels that I read under the covers at my convent boarding school in Simla.

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.

I'm not interested in passion and love for their own sake - without the struggle of life, they're just fluff.

Every film is a political act; it's how you see the world.

I grew up in a small town in India, but through books I knew the world.

We have three generations at home, including my father-in-law. I keep a very low profile, and a lot of things I do are very much with the family in mind. I have actually made films with the family around me.

We have not learned the lessons of 9/11. This wrongful suspicion, racial hatred, and profiling is what I keep seeing.

I've been able to look at the world differently from three continents practically. I've always lived between India and the U.S. When I married Mahmood I became a daughter-in-law of Africa. That really changed my worldview. I can see it from so many perspectives.

My family is almost exactly like the one in 'Monsoon Wedding'. We are very open, fairly liberal, loud people.

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.

The film itself should interact with the audience. In the case of 'Queen of Katwe', people are laughing, sobbing and dancing. I am taking them on a ride... It is not like I am asking them for handouts.

Never treat anything you do as a stepping stone. Do it fully, and follow it completely.

We all know the power of film; we all know there's almost nothing more powerful than to see people on film that look and talk like you, like we do.

I started to make my own films, however small and however independent they were, from the beginning. And so, even though I was nobody, I was always the master of my own work.

Sitting in America, we never get to know the other side in any kind of believable way. We have so many movies about Iraq, Afghanistan, and this and that, but there is never a character from that side.

It gave me a lot of pleasure and pride that 90 percent of the crew for 'Monsoon Wedding,' and most of my film, are women. We get the work done, you know, much lesser play of ego... And I really believe in harmony, I believe in working in a spirit of egolessness and that the film is bigger than all of us.

You've got to understand that in Bollywood, every actor is an instrument, and yet a human being. They come to the set with a set agenda, believing, 'This is who I am, this is what I want, and no, I am not going to become that character you want me to.'

Post 9/11, so much has changed in New York that it does not give you that homely feeling which it did before.

I think in the last thirty years, the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. It is not something that you can see with rose-colored glasses.

I don't think boldness should be associated with showing off skin. It's not the basis of boldness.

I'm a self-taught landscape gardener; it's a real passion of mine. It's what I do in my spare time because trees don't ask questions!

Once 9/11 happened, people who looked like me and whose children looked like us and whose husbands looked of a community, really were made to feel quite the other, and I thought that was impossible in a city like New York but I myself was witness to that.

I listen to music deeply and seriously for at least an hour or two a day.

What's nice about what we have is when you enter the set, the world of film, it becomes this real cocoon, very different from all the publicity. That's the fun part.

As the director of a film, as the story teller, you have to keep your voice alive.

To make films, you have to have something to say. To have something to say, you have to be a student of life. And to be a student of life, you have to be feeding yourself with what life, politics, society, and your family fuels you with.

New York City is home to so many people from so many places and the uniqueness of it is that you never feel a foreigner. English is almost hardly ever heard in the subway. In fact, it's weird.

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.

Creative freedom is an imperative for me, but it doesn't really exist in a Hollywood game.

Christmas lights may be the loneliest thing for me, especially if you mix them up with reindeers and sleighs. I feel alone. I feel isolated. I feel I do not belong.

Middle-class Pakistani cultural life is what I've seen, what I know - they're not all screaming faceless mullahs. It's disturbing that in American films, the character on the other side is not even named.

From Vietnam's 'Deer Hunter' to Iraq, films are never about the person who has had his house destroyed.

Americans are not used to being bombed in their beds, but if you come from anywhere outside America, it's not highly unusual.

There's nothing universal about Indian families except that the family itself is deeply important across the country. It's sort of the fabric and anchor of our country.

With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.

I know what it's like to be in one place and dream of another. I also know what it's like to feel that nostalgia is a fairly useless thing because it is stasis.

For seven years, I made films in the cinema verite tradition - photographing what was happening without manipulating it. Then I realised I wanted to make things happen for myself, through feature films.

I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room.

I am an independent film-maker first and foremost. I have always cut my own cloth.

I am at home in many cultures. I live actively in three continents and I've done that for most of my life, so I just make films as I see the world, and that happens to speak to people. I do things that I want to do.

They say now in America that final cut doesn't mean anything. As Harvey Weinstein said to some film-maker, 'You can have final cut. I'll open your film in Arkansas.'

I listen to Ustad Vilayat Khan's 'Raga Khamaj' and 'Raga Jaijaiwanti' virtually every morning, a lot of Abdullah Ibrahim, Michael Kiwanuka, Savages, and contemporary Ugandan pop.

Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place.

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.

India somehow constantly rivets and inspires me, and I feel very relieved to have come from this country which has a very 'lifeist' approach to living fully, no matter what one has or doesn't have.

I think, in terms of activism associated with my films, be it 'Salaam Baalak Trust' or 'Maisha,' taking the idea of cinema as a way to change people, I feel heartened. I am glad that we have impacted thousands of lives.

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.

It took me three years to learn to dress in the American way, especially in winter. That was just like me. I barely wear socks even now.

I grew up in a very small town which is remote even by Indian standards. I always dreamed of the world.

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.'