People talk about Bollywood being very kitsch, and just songs and dances, and over the top and colorful.
There are people who think I'm a Bolshevik, and this is all a major distraction at best and heresy at worst. But I really don't care.
Among those people lucky enough, if you will, to have actually been brought to trial as a political prisoner, several historians have said there has not been one acquittal since the Bolshevik Revolution.
I connect with just plain old everyday people. Human behavior fascinates me, the people who are the nuts and bolts of this country who help hold up the world.
Most people don't know who Ken Mehlman is. He's the chairman of the Republican Party, obviously, but what he's doing that Howard Dean isn't doing is spending a lot of time on the nuts and bolts of putting the party together.
Literary interviews are inevitably packed with the nuts and bolts of how writers do their work, and there's very little that aspiring writers do more readily than fling other people's nuts and bolts into their toolboxes.
When I was 18, I went to the Soviet Union. I kept hearing that America was planning to bomb them - lots of bombs were going to come down on these people. I went there not knowing anything, except that I thought the whole thing was stupid and that I wanted to see who these people were that we were going to bomb.
After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.
When your culture comes from watching TV every day, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities. None of that happened where I was. You're almost taught to realize it's not for you.
How irritating it must be for people, to be bombarded with me!
Growing up in Bombay, I saw many sick people.
When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn't speak a word of English. In England, people might be very understanding about that, but in Bombay, they're not very forgiving. 'If you don't speak English, how do you expect to work in Hindi films?'
People will say a movie bombed at the box office but I couldn't care less.
In our culture, we get very much into shorthanding people. And I got shorthanded as That Guy: Jennifer Lopez, movies bombed, therefore he must be a sort of thoughtless dilettante, solipsistic consumer blahblahblah. It's hard to shake those sort of narratives.
I bombed in front of 5,000 people. Anybody that's ever stood in front of 5,000 people that don't like them can tell you, it's an energy associated with that. You don't want to feel that. You ask yourself, 'Do you really really want to do this?'
Our house was bombed, and the roof fell in. We were sitting under the stairs of the basement, and we were quite safe, but it brought home the realization. In two nights 400 people were killed in small town.
People don't remember that during the Fifties and Sixties there was a Cold War, and kids were getting under their desks during school because they thought they were going to get bombed. So it wasn't really that ideal at all.
I am so sick of reading about another car bomb, another suicide bomber, another 10, 20, 30, 70, 100 people dead in a day, both Americans and Iraqis.
I have heard from many readers since 'The Girl in the Blue Beret' came out. The story of my airline pilot, former B-17 bomber pilot Marshall Stone, on his search to find the people who helped him during World War II has struck a chord.
I pointed out that the Atlanta Olympic bomber - as well as Timothy McVeigh and the people who protest against gay rights at military funerals - are Christians but we journalists don't identify them by their religion.
