American Quotes

I most often land up taking up the roles that I most detest.

I loved the stage and then grew to love the camera.

I like to take up something that is challenging. I like to stretch myself.

I demanded two weeks of rehearsal because to me as an actor, that's the most important time.

I am an actress and acting is my passion... period!

And that's why I chose on purpose not to have a death scene. We've seen them in a million movies and it's too much like cranking the tears out. I didn't want that scene.

After doing so many different roles, if you don't stretch yourself, there's no excitement left.

A friend of mine described it this way: When they were born it was like a meteor landed in our house and blew everything apart. We had to just put all the pieces back.

Competition is very good... as long as its healthy. It's what makes one strive to be better.

I don't want to fight aging; I want to take good care of myself, but plastic surgery and all that? I'm not interested.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

His life was one long extravaganza, like living inside a Faberge egg.

That was my one big Hollywood hit, but, in a way, it hurt my picture career. After that, I was typecast as a lion, and there just weren't many parts for lions.

After The Wizard Of Oz I was typecast as a lion, and there aren't all that many parts for lions.

Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians.

On the screen I saw tanks rolling through dusty streets, and fallen buildings, and forests of unfamiliar trees into which East Pakistani refugees had fled, seeking safety over the Indian border.

My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it.

It's easy to set a story anywhere if you get a good guidebook and get some basic street names, and some descriptions, but, for me, yes, I am indebted to my travels to India for several of the stories.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.

In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, 'Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?' I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.

In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.

If I stop to think about fans, or best-selling, or not best-selling, or good reviews, or not-good reviews, it just becomes too much. It's like staring at the mirror all day.

I've seen novels that have grown out of one story in a collection. But it hasn't occurred to me to take any of those stories and build on them. They seem very finished for me, so I don't feel like going back and dredging them up.

I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now.

I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.

I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.

I don't know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents' marriage. And it's interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison.

I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them.