I think it's always hard for people to get their head around the fact that populist, commercial films can also actually be great works of art.
I'm a populist. I'm the people's designer... It's important that there are price points that allow people in who maybe don't have the ability to have higher-ticket items - but they can still have something very emblematic of the collection.
One of the very few things that I actually read about myself on blogs that got to me was people saying, 'Ne-Yo doesn't do R&B music anymore.' Just because I stepped off the porch to explore doesn't mean I don't live in that house anymore.
America is the one place where you can talk of 'this nation' and everyone knows exactly what you think. People put a flag on their porch, and they do have a desire to localize everything and celebrate things locally.
I didn't come to Hollywood to get on magazine covers or start my Porsche collection or to enjoy that kind of lifestyle, to go to the right parties and meet the right people.
The Porsche was just a vehicle to get to another place. I used it to change people's perceptions of me. I had grown up really middle class. USC was filled with elitists, richies who would go skiing every weekend. So I pretended like I was part of that world - to be accepted.
I spent 12 years of my life writing stories without black people. That's insane to me. It's insane that I could have believed in magical portals and dragons and all that stuff, but to believe a black person could be experiencing those things was unimaginable.
It became clear to me that our value as people is not in our stock portfolios and bank accounts but in the legacies we leave behind.
I love picking people. I started Blackstone, and we had no people, and now we have with our portfolio companies about 750,000 people all over the world. Everybody who is at a senior level has ultimately been picked by me.
People have libraries at home, they have bookshelves, they have CDs. And they sort of try, people try to bring great artists into their lives, into their physical houses and sort of live with portions of them. But they're not really deeply engaging with them.
How many times do you get to play in Portland in front of how many thousands of people? That's the kind of environment we want to be in.
As soon as you put something to bed like the 'Women' book, you're never finished. There were portraits of people that I wanted to photograph - it's an endless subject.
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.
I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.
People don't have time to wait for somebody to paint their portraits anymore. The money is in photography.
I love films that show people in a way that's so real it's almost unsettling, and that's what really inspires me because I write about people. I write about people that I know, so I want to portray them and portray myself in a way that is unapologetic.
The parent characters that I portray are Indian because I grew up in an Indian household. Having said that, I feel like people of all cultures would relate to those parents.
We call our country home of the brave and land of the free, but it's not. We give a false portrayal of freedom. We're not free - if we were, we'd allow people their freedom.
People are tired of mainstream media's limited and confined portrayal of people of color.
When I was an adolescent in England, at school we had to read 'Death of a Salesman.' I remember feeling incredibly moved by the portrayal of these people and the idea with which Miller broached the whole subject of failure or failed systems, or the way that people are crushed by a system in which they find themselves.
