Motherhood was the great equaliser for me; I started to identify with everybody... as a mother, you have that impulse to wish that no child should ever be hurt, or abused, or go hungry, or not have opportunities in life.
A great director, first, is highly intelligent. And he is also a dedicated and willing to work hard. Now those are easy things to identify. The third is the creativity, and that is very difficult to identify in advance. This is why so many of the directors who have started with me were my assistant - the first one was Francis Ford Coppola.
I use humour a lot because humour is a great equaliser. Everyone laughs at the same things if you set them up properly, and that makes everybody equal. At the end of the day, I see my job as being there to entertain as well as inform and provoke.
The public library is the great equaliser.
We've never been in a time where mothers - parenthood, but particularly motherhood - is so fetishized. There's a whole industry around motherhood and mother-daughter bonds. And certainly when my mother was sick I found there was an incredible expectation for me to tell everybody how we were having this bonding experience and how healing it was.
I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn't identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.
To call the coronavirus a great equaliser turned out to be the greatest falsification of our time.
I identify with my body, but I don't identify it as male or female; I just identify it as a vehicle to help me bring my awareness around the world.
When I first started to blow up, everybody thought I was rich. Everybody started asking for stuff. My friends started becoming fans. Even my teachers began to act like fans.
I do identify as a Muslim and I do identify as a Bangladeshi girl, I identify as British, as well, and a woman and I'm a woman of colour, and why am I ashamed of that? And I used to not want to talk about it. But that is me.
Feminism or the family? Carried to excess maybe. I have insisted that women cannot be defined solely in those terms. But for a great many women - not all, because we are only beginning to realize and affirm the diversity of women themselves - choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice.
It was always like there was no doubt in anybody's mind that I was going to UCLA, so once UCLA started recruiting me, everybody started pushing me there.
One thing that I learned that helped me deal with human behavior is confrontation, and I'm not that great with confrontation at all. But once I started to be O.K. with that, the better everybody's life got.
In my movies, I portray this 'Everyman' persona, someone everybody can empathize with. People can identify with a guy like me.
When my friends started to care about getting girlfriends, I really didn't. I started to think, literally, 'What's wrong with me?' and, 'Why can't I be normal like everybody else?'
Education must be a great equaliser in our society. It must be the tool to level the differences that our various social systems have created over the past thousands of years.