To start with, I love New York… It’s a little bit of the whole world… In New York, the whole world comes to you.

I seem to be getting a lot of things pushed my way that are strong women. It’s like people see Hackers and they send me offers to play tough women with guns, the kind who wear no bra and a little tank top. I’d like to play strong women who are also very feminine.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

What the Pope thinks of being gay does not matter to the world. It matters to the people who like the Pope and follow the Pope… It is not a reflection of all religious people.

Rebellion is what you make of it. When you’ve been on a tour bus for two months straight, and then you get in your car and drive wherever you want, that can feel rebellious.

I read a lot when I’m travelling and always have a couple of books on the go.

Barack knows the American Dream because he’s lived it, and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are or where we’re from or what we look like or who we love.

Everything is possible, from angels to demons to economists and politicians.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

We don’t need to share the same opinions as others, but we need to be respectful.

I am confident I will set foot again in Tibet in my lifetime.

There are a lot of good women in New York.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

Women are the engine driving the growth in California’s economy. Women make California’s economy unique.

There’s nowhere else like London. Nothing at all, anywhere.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

It’s useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‚race‘ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

‚Kitchen Confidential‘ wasn’t a cautionary or an expose. I wrote it as an entertainment for New York tri-state area line cooks and restaurant lifers, basically; I had no expectation that it would move as far west as Philadelphia.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

In all my days of schooling, from preschool all the way up to 12th grade, there was not one white person in my class. Literally zero.

The immigration issue is, I recognize, one that generates a lot of passion, but it does not make sense for us to want to push talent out.

I shouldn’t be near Vegas and have money in my pocket.

I don’t just listen to rap.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

Being on tour is like being in limbo. It’s like going from nowhere to nowhere.

I cycled when I was at high school, then reconnected with bikes in New York in the late ’70s. It was a good way of getting around the clubs and galleries of the Lower East Side and Soho.

I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix.

I’ve been here before and will come again, but I’m not going this trip through.

Apple has given me a platform to spread music. They’re giving us Latinos a chance to shine.

We’re introducing separate rooms with double beds in all of our planes so people can actually go with their partner and have a proper night’s sleep.

Religion is compulsory in English schools, you know.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

It’s very strange to go to cities like London and New York. People walk so quickly, they seem to be in a hurry all the time. And you don’t say ‚Hi‘ to everyone you meet, and you don’t smile to everyone you meet, because there’s just so many. Which is also very strange.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?

Here’s the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it’s put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don’t call them a white film. I’m trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films.

All of us are so mixed. My great-grandfather was white.

I will meet my countrymen. I understand only one language: that they are my countrymen, they are my brothers. You may see with whatever colour you want; Modi will not go into that colour.

In Paris, you’re as far as possible from the land of pleasant smiles.

El Salvador is a democracy so it’s not surprising that there are many voices to be heard here. Yet in my conversations with Salvadorans… I have heard a single voice.

People gonna be they own individuals and have they own worlds and I can’t knock it.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.

I’m very proud to be black, but black is not all I am. That’s my cultural historical background, my genetic makeup, but it’s not all of who I am nor is it the basis from which I answer every question.

I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Paris ain’t much of a town.

Even in this globalised world, London is still the standard for our times. The city has embraced the world’s diversity and represents the finest in human achievements.

I live in Hollywood, but you can’t make me love Hollywood. I’ll never love Hollywood.

I never write about the road. I never write about hotels or anything like that.

I like to combine visits to more than one place when I go on my international tours in order to get more done. I’m from Ahmedabad where we have a saying, ‚Single-fare, double journey.‘

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.

The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.

A lot of the time when I write about the person that I love, I feel like I’m writing about New York.

When I’m doing a book tour in the States, I’ll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don’t know where I am right away. I’ll go to the window, and it doesn’t help there either, especially if you’re in an anonymous strip and it’s the usual Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Chili’s, Applebee’s.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Everest and my trips to the poles. But there’s no doubt that my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics.