People are generally proud of their food. A willingness to eat and drink with people without fear and prejudice… they open up to you in ways that somebody visiting who is driven by a story may not get.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

I wouldn’t put myself forward to do a film like ‚Changeling‘ if I thought I couldn’t pull people into a story because of all the other ways people see me.

Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

It’s easy to make an album full of great songs. But I want people to go for the ride. The songs have to make sense together.

Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

I’ve got nothing to hide.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.

I’m never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

The stories are not autobiographical, but they’re personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I’ve learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal.

No one has a greater asset for his business than a man’s pride in his work.

The boys know they’re from Southeast Asia, and they have their food and their music and their friends, and they have a pride particular to them.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

My friends and I had fun together, but I was more reserved, not at all the life of the party. I would just be the quiet one in the room.

In fairy tales the bad guy is very easy to spot. The bad guy is always wearing a black cape so you always know who he is.

We just seem to have lost all our morals and principles and values these days.

I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my life story.

By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.

I would never win an award for not loving pizza.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

The Joker that Christopher Nolan created in ‚The Dark Knight‘ had the scar across his mouth, and the first time you heard his explanation for it, he makes you believe that’s how he got it. But then you get into the film, and every time he talks about his scar, it’s a totally different story.

Why can’t I just eat my waffle?

Anger is the enemy of non-violence and pride is a monster that swallows it up.

I usually don’t like to ‚spoon feed‘ my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

Bad food is made without pride, by cooks who have no pride, and no love. Bad food is made by chefs who are indifferent, or who are trying to be everything to everybody, who are trying to please everyone… Bad food is fake food… food that shows fear and lack of confidence in people’s ability to discern or to make decisions about their lives.

The first story I finished was when I was six years old.

Dancing was always part of my culture growing up in Barbados. When I shot my 1st video I worked really hard with my choreographer to perfect the routines.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality.

I try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.

There are two kinds of pride, both good and bad. ‚Good pride‘ represents our dignity and self-respect. ‚Bad pride‘ is the deadly sin of superiority that reeks of conceit and arrogance.

I like to reminisce with people I don’t know.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

The reason why I wear gold – I wear gold for three reasons. One, when Jesus was born, three wise men came from the east: one brought frankincense, one brought myrrh, the other one brought gold. The second reason I wear gold is I can afford it. The third reason I wear it, it’s symbolic of my African heritage.

We don’t want an America that is closed to the world. What we want is a world that is open to America.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

I love trying out different cuisines. In Delhi, I love Megu at the Leela, and TK’s at the Hyatt. I also enjoy Khan Chacha’s rolls. In Mumbai, it’s Royal China and Shiro. And in Bangalore, I like the food at Bricklane.

If there is only one thing in my life that I am proud of, it’s that I’ve never been a kept woman.

The vulgar boil, the learned roast, an egg.

French fries kill more people than guns and sharks, yet nobody’s afraid of French fries.

My parents taught me service – not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.

Just as I wanted to outdo everyone when I played, I had to outdo everyone when we were out on the town.

There wasn’t much as a kid that inspired me in what I did as an adult, but I was always very interested in what motivates people, and in telling stories and building things.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

What I like to drink most is wine that belongs to others.