Quotes from Javed Akhtar

I believe that life offers you packages. It doesn't offer you good and bad, otherwise you will choose the good and you will leave the bad. It offers you packages and every package has some good and some bad.

Main jahaan rahoon Main kahin bhi hoon Teri yaad saath hai....!

If you plunder from west to east you are great like Alexander. if you do the same from east to west you are a barbarian like Chengiz.

Rooth Na Jana Tum Se Kahoon To Main in Aankhon Mein Jo Rahoon To!

Any belief that cannot be defended by logic, proof or evidence is protected by hurt feelings and if needed expressed by violence.

You have to write some poetry, first of all, to decide if you can become a lyricist. I was born in a family of poets.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was like a leading star of the progressive writers who emerged in undivided India.

Working with anyone is easy as long as you realise that your collaborator has the understanding and experience even if he is younger to you.

Words are not thoughts, just like bricks are not homes. But houses are made with bricks. If you have less bricks, you will make a small house. The more words you have, the clearer your thoughts, and the more clearly you can convey them.

Everything is now moving fast so communication has to be fast as well. But the tragedy is that we have attained this speed at the cost of depth of words.

Generally, we tend to believe that royalty is only for mainstream Hindi commercial cinema music and maybe some popular ghazal singer or pop singer but we never think that classical music is played at so many places.

By the time I was 12, I had memorised hundreds of couplets. I could recite for hours poems written by others. I knew I could write a line in metre. But I never dared to do it till I was 33 years old.

I know Priyanka Chopra personally. She is a cultured, decent and educated person and the fact remains that she is an Indian.

Very rarely does a mainstream film push the envelope. A film that's so-called mainstream and questions certain norms, certain notions of morality, and gets away with it opens doors. It means the common man, the majority of the people, have accepted it.

Indian cinema is changing not because of outside pressure but because of inside pressure. Society is changing. Obviously, ideas change because of globalization, because of the huge middle class that is mostly first generation.

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

For an average noun or an average verb, an average mind can quickly create reference. Where did they hear it? See it? What does it remind them of? What is its connection? When was it last used in conversation? What has been my experience with it? A host of memories appear when you hear a word you remember.

If you are educated in English-medium schools, you get a better view of the world, develop more liberal values, have more gender sensitivity and become more forward looking. But you pay a price because you don't know your own language.