I waste most of the day, then finally start to write around 3 P.M., totally disgusted with myself for my wasteful nature.
At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply reporting on the world I observe, which is frequently hilarious.
I am somewhat grateful to the disintegration of my marriage for teaching me a lot about myself and about relationships, and though I wish it hadn't been such a taxing lesson, I wouldn't change a thing.
When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It's not my business whether people like or dislike it.
Do I sometimes wish I were thinner? God, in the old days, absolutely I did, but now I feel that to lose weight would be disloyal to myself.
When I got into rap I didn't exactly win any popularity contests. I called myself Dee Dee King, after B.B. King, to the total dismay of my fellow Ramones.
I'm often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I've always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible.
Sometimes when I go out on the road, I feel almost embarrassed or dismayed because I can't be the image of what kids want me to be. So I just try to be myself, and usually that works out OK.
I had to learn to dismiss people who would criticize me based on nothing, but I also had to learn not to believe the people who would compliment me and think I was great based on nothing. And that led me to have a very, very strong sense of myself and my strengths.
After the novel was published, I came to feel that I couldn't call myself Orthodox anymore. It's so patriarchal, anti-women, anti-gay. There was something about writing 'Disobedience'... it felt like I had put it all in the book. I had done my best by it, recorded what it meant for me. I felt I was done.
In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my future.
My significant other right now is myself, which is what happens when you suffer from multiple personality disorder and self-obsession.
I disoriented myself from everything about being a human being and just played and played and played and sang and sang and sang.
I love my job... but I find myself awkwardly straddling the divide between British Islam and the British media. I get pretty exhausted of having to constantly endure a barrage of lazy stereotypes, inflammatory headlines, disparaging generalisations, and often inaccurate and baseless stories.
The truth is I'm not actually an expert programmer! I really don't consider myself to be an expert at anything. For me, it's more about having a well-rounded and broad horizon. I think that's where a lot of the more interesting things come from - mashing up completely disparate aspects of life to create something new and original.
I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.
I used to cry myself to sleep wishing I was ugly because of the way men leered at and disrespected me.
Each time I think I've created time for myself, along comes a throwback to disrupt my private space.
I feel like I need to find ways to disrupt the other team and apply that pressure they might not be used to. I think being able to set that tone is something I'm priding myself on.
The protagonists that I've played tend to be people who make trouble. Or even if they don't make it, they certainly disrupt things. It's fun to do that in life as well. But I don't think I ever played myself.
