Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have spent my entire life living in a zoo, which is pretty crazy. Not many kids get to say that, and it took me until I was about three years old to realize that we didn't just come to the zoo every day, that we actually lived here.
When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.
The minute I stepped foot on the shop floor and started serving in a retail environment, I knew it was the career for me. I was a shop assistant for just one day, and I thought, 'This is it. This is the rest of my life. This is all I want to do.'
It's not about living my life as a boy or a girl - but I'm also not trans - it's just that one day, you wake up feeling masculine, and one day, you wake up feeling feminine. The flickering in between those two states is what's most fertile for me.
Helping parents to meet the everyday costs of raising their families, helping them lift themselves up to create a better life for their children and keeping them safe is what motivated me to get into public life, and it continues to drive me every day.
Once I started on 'Frances' I discovered it was literally a bottomless well. It devastated me to maintain that for eighteen weeks, to be immersed in this state of rage for twelve to eighteen hours a day. It spilled all over, into other areas of my life.
Back 20 years ago, I was recording with Bruce Springsteen, and his producer called me and said I had to be in the studio the next day to finish the sessions, and I couldn't. I had to be in court, in California. All this took like 10 years out of my life.
The things I learned early on from my granddad, the things he instilled in me, are still to this day a huge part and a huge priority of my own life. Even the little stuff like my granddad always telling me to tuck in my shirt at church. It sticks with you.
I just lead my life as naturally, as normally as I possibly can. But I can't help it if controversy is hounding me day in and day out. I'm quite amazed sometimes by the way they go about it. I grow a beard and it lands up in the editorial in The Times of India.
My mother was suffering every day of her life, and what right did I have to be happy if she was suffering? So whenever I got happy about something, I felt the need to cut it off, and the only way to cut it off was to pray. 'Forgive me Lord.' For what, I didn't know.
Writing and directing, to me, was the logical evolution from my life as an actor: going from telling someone else's story to actually creating my own. Perhaps one day I will do all three: write, direct, and act in the same production. That might get a little hectic, though.
I seem to spend a minimum of eight hours a day in transit of some sort or another... that's eight hours of your life gone. People always ask if I suffer from jet lag, but it's kinda become really normal for me... Although the jet lag does become a factor and you're pretty much always tired.
I was joking the other day about how my real life feels like a TV show, and my TV life feels real - because, to be on Thursday nights on NBC, which is what I grew up with, has been such a big part of inspiring me. To be part of that tradition is really completely surreal, and I'm so grateful.
People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects.
I used to have terrible acne on my face: red, splotchy discoloration. And mucus - I was constantly blowing my nose. Then one day, this woman sits down next to me on a bus, and says, 'You're lactose-intolerant.' It all cleared up in three days. That changed my life. Doctors couldn't figure it out.
It's more enjoyable for me to know that life is finite. Knowing that, I would like to go to a party. When you get to the holidays, if you think that the holidays will be forever, you just take it for granted. But, if you know that you have just three days at the beach, you will be so happy to be there every day.