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" I listen to Ustad Vilayat Khan's 'Raga Khamaj' and 'Raga Jaijaiwanti' virtually every morning, a lot of Abdullah Ibrahim, Michael Kiwanuka, Savages, and contemporary Ugandan pop. "

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" The dignity of everyday life - the beauty of it, the attitude of it - is what I live around. And it is never on screen, and it is certainly never associated with Africa. If we see Africa at all, it is always used as a backdrop: a big blob of a continent rather than a specific street or a country or a place. "

Mira Nair

Life

Beauty

Live

" 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. "

" Life is short, so I'm knowing exactly where I'm putting my time. I don't want to do things that I don't have to do. "

" 'No words - action' was the lesson my mother taught me: as artists, we have the privilege of holding a mirror to the world, to engage, to question, to bring beauty to a complex universe. "

Mira Nair

Mother

Beauty

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

" Humility is not a trait I often associate with America. "

" In our house we say 'adolescence' is a western word. We don't believe in it. "

" In Uganda, I am surrounded, unfortunately, by evangelicals; I can't bear it. Every night I hear the chants of Baptists urging people to be born again. "

" I think optimism springs from nature. I'm a gardener. Nature has taught me about rhythm, the essence of every art. With so much that is terrible, nature gives me pleasure. "

Mira Nair

Nature

Art

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A lot of us feel that we are against the war; we are against profiling and are against what is happening. We are tired of war in every manifestation. American people do not all believe in what the government has been doing. "

" Making films is about having absolute and foolish confidence; the challenge for all of us is to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant. "

" To make films, you have to have something to say. To have something to say, you have to be a student of life. And to be a student of life, you have to be feeding yourself with what life, politics, society, and your family fuels you with. "

" In America, we have so many movies and so much media about the Islamic world, the sub-continental world, but it's not a conversation, it's a monologue. It's always from one point of view. 'If we don't tell our own stories, no one will tell them' is my mantra. "

" Once 9/11 happened, people who looked like me and whose children looked like us and whose husbands looked of a community, really were made to feel quite the other, and I thought that was impossible in a city like New York but I myself was witness to that. "

" 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. "

Mira Nair

Sweet

Music

" I started to make my own films, however small and however independent they were, from the beginning. And so, even though I was nobody, I was always the master of my own work. "

" Never take no for answer, and try to make films that turn you on. "

" I grew up in a small town in India, but through books I knew the world. "

" I think I am kind of put on this Earth to speak of being between worlds in my films. "

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

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

" I immediately was captured by 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist.' It gave me a springboard into contemporary Pakistan and a dialogue between Pakistan and the rest of the world. "

" My films, no one else will do. "

" With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story. "

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

Mira Nair

Teach

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. "

" Christmas lights may be the loneliest thing for me, especially if you mix them up with reindeers and sleighs. I feel alone. I feel isolated. I feel I do not belong. "

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