You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.

I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.

Just as I have broken the monopoly of film music as being synonymous with popular music in our country, I want to prove that cricket is not the only glamorous sport.

As an actor, the only thing you have is your instinct and your imagination.

The idea of love as a mysterious, undiscovered world has come to have no place in our innermost imagination.