Practically every time I speak up at a school conference, a political event, or my apartment building association's annual meeting, I'm met with a display of someone else's superior intelligence.

Earnestness makes British people gag.

I always knew the French had a penchant for criticism and abstract thought. Usually, that just meant they complained a lot.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.

Your child probably won't get into the Ivy League or win a sports scholarship. At age 24, he might be back in his childhood bedroom, in debt, after a mediocre college career. Raise him so that, if that happens, it will still have been worth it.

If you had asked me what I wanted when I was 12 years old, I probably would have said, 'To marry a plastic surgeon.' You can hardly blame me: I was growing up in Miami.

When I left for college, I put Miami behind me and tried to have a life of the mind. I got a graduate degree. I traveled. I even married a fellow writer, whose only real estate was a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Paris, where we lived.

Like practically everyone who grew up in Miami, I knew little about its history. We were more worried about mangoes falling on our cars.

I'm a third-generation Miamian. I'm fond of it. I'm an expatriate, so it's the only American city I can still legitimately claim.

One of the maddening things about being a foreigner in France is that hardly anyone in the rest of the world knows what's really happening here. They think Paris is a socialist museum where people are exceptionally good at eating small bits of chocolate and tying scarves.

While I love walking past those beautifully lit bookstores in my neighborhood, what I mostly buy there are blank notebooks and last-minute presents for children's birthdays.

Soccer may not explain the world or even contain the world. But it makes the world a slightly happier place.

I spend much of my free time listening to podcasts of American comedians talking to each other.

A lot of French comedy is satire.

The French aren't known for being hilarious. When I told Parisians I was interested in French humor, they'd say 'French what?'

Even for natives, French satire is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Its unspoken punch line is typically that things have gone irrevocably wrong, and the government is to blame.

Not many foreigners move to Paris for their dream job. Many do it on a romantic whim.

Our cinema is coming of age, and people are realizing we need to tell different stories differently and in fresh manner and not just do formula stuff and serve it to the audience.

My wife and I often have debates about who studied in a better school and when I list KVM alumni, she kind of loses the argument.

In India, writers are underpaid. Universities should start new courses to create more opportunities for them.

Drama should be taught in schools to have more artistic people.

We have ambitions, we go on with our lives. We get married and have families. But I was interested to know what happens to those girls who become mothers and grandmothers. They sacrificed their self at a time when they were young and healthy.

Back in the 1990s, I had an opportunity to make a film. But I realized that it is better for me to go in stages so I could explore myself as an actor and in the process I started writing scripts.

Cinema which is well-made, for any kind of audience, is worthy of being watched by just about anybody who would like to watch a good story being told.

School days were very special to me as I never found the time to complete my graduation.

I admit TV is a far cry from the films that I started my career with, like 'Ek Doctor Ki Maut.' It's like reading Chekov and then going on to a comic strip.

I don't have any single character that is my favorite because I would like to be known for the sum total of my work and not for an individual character that I might have played.

Content-driven films can make money - something that is gripping, is a journey of revelation and is relevant is cinema.

The director needs to have a vision and clarity in his mind. It's not enough to know the story, he or she should have the knowledge and efficiency to execute it articulately.

I am a father who never pushes or forces his children into anything.

Every actor must go through the process of learning and not just be in a hurry to become famous. They should learn to live in small amounts and not to try and copy others.

I have been rather selective, doing not more than two or thee films a year, so that leaves me with plenty of time to prep for my plays and theatre activities.

I do a project and then I forget about it because the release of whatever work you have done is not in your hand.

I agree I'd like to do more work. But the right kind of roles has to be offered to me. I'm not saying the roles need to be realistic all the time, though that's what I like connecting with on screen.

As an actor, my desire was always to be different, there was a desire to associate yourself with projects that bring about the contemporary situation.

It's a bit unusual that I'm the novelist and the actor who is reading out his own material.

I believe that the performance of my actors is of utmost importance to make a good film.

I am very lazy.

My friend Akshay Upadhyay and I used to write poetry and read out to each other.

For a father, to separate from his son is not easy.

What's most fortunate is that once he turned 18, Shahid assisted me for a while, so we got to spend a lot of time with each other.

My son has been wiser than me in terms of his career graph. He saw to it that he became a star first and start to get all the roles that he wanted to do.

As an actor, I have always felt, everything is available in the script. If there is anything you feel the script lacks, you can have a discussion with the director and point out those.

There's no set rule, but when you look at the script, you start thinking about this person and how to create this human being on screen. You dig deeper into a script.

My job is that of an actor. As long as I get to act, get some interesting parts to play, get to be a part of interesting stories, I would certainly want to do it.

I have learnt to become patient as an actor.

Many people from the industry come up to me and say 'We don't see you onscreen much.' But where are the scripts? Do you think I am not sitting in my office and waiting for something like 'Matru' to happen to me? I would love to do four such films in a year.

I am human and get insecure because I am a middle class man and I need to feed my family and acting is the only job I know.

I feel that God has been amazingly kind to me. How many actors get to stay for 30 years and play the kind of roles that I have done?