Quotes from Mira Nair

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.

My family is vital to me - just the sense of being surrounded by no pretension.

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.

I am Indian, and my home is Kampala. My world is already diverse. But films are financed by those who want to see themselves on screen, and it is a white male world. Still, it does feel like America is waking up. Let's hope it's the start of an avalanche.

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

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.'

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 love the idea that it doesn't take one person only to achieve your potential. It takes a village, it takes a community, a street, a teacher, a mother.

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.

My close friends call me the bulldozer who never says no. I have never not made a film.

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

I often begin movies with music in my head; it's a very important dimension to me. Not just the music itself, but how to use music in film: when and how and subtlety. I don't like to be too sweet in my stories, and I like the abrasive clang, the contrasting of sounds and cultures.

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.

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

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.

We have to realize only in communication, in real knowledge, in real reaching out, can there be an understanding that there's humanity everywhere, and that's what I'm trying to do.

'Salaam Bombay' didn't put a halo on the poor. Instead, it said that they will teach us how to live.

I always like to reveal the fact that the emperor has no clothes. And children are best at that. They teach us how to see the world in that sense. They are without artifice; they see it for what it is. I am drawn to that ruthless honesty.

What is really important to me is a sense of humour and a mischief about life. Life is just too boring otherwise.

If we don't tell our own stories, no one else will.

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

I am still attracted to stories about people who are considered to be on the outside of society. I still seek inspiration from those stories.

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.

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