“In Britain, you never get away from the fact that you’re a foreigner. In the U.S., the view is it doesn’t matter where you come from.”

The great joy of doing ‘The Daily Show’ for me is that I get to sit on the fence between cultures. I am commenting on the absurdity of both sides as an outsider and insider. Sometimes I’m playing the brown guy, and sometimes I’m not, but the best stuff I do always goes back to being a brown kid in a white world.

The idea that I had anything to do with speaking about Islam or about the Muslim world was just absurd to my family. … I hadn’t been to the mosque in like 10 years.

Now the bigots have to get creative. Good luck coming up with slurs for Chechens. Go back where you came from, Ushanka head.

People lament that there’s no roles being written for South Asian or Muslim characters. But their parents don’t want their children to go into the entertainment field. You don’t get it both ways.

I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it’s been something that I’ve always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.

Voter fraud does just barely exist, while racism, according to the Supreme Court, is a thing of the past.

I think family dynamics are definitely very interesting. And in my case my sister did get married. She gave my parents a grandchild.

I don’t want to tell people what they should think.

You do find a lot of your time in the West kind of searching for your place in the world – your voice, your identity, like, who am I? Like, what is my reason for being here, you know? And in that same way who am I to be partnered with, you know?

Comedy can reach many more people than, say, a serious lecture on the topic. And comedy might just be the access point to reach people who want to be entertained and also learn something.

Of course the law’s not racist.

I think you had the GOP down there in North Carolina reaching out to African-American voters and this guy coming on television and using the N-word and saying what Don Yelton said.

England has an interesting relationship with the Indian subcontinent because the years of colonization and the history between the two places.

From my parent’s generation the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love. It was a partnership. It’s about creating family. It’s about creating offspring.

When I was 11 my friend’s mom made a peanut butter sandwich. I ate the sandwich and was like, ‘I’m never eating anything else again.’ And I still eat peanut butter every day. I would put peanut butter on a steak.

When my family decided to leave England I could not have been happier. I was sort of like – America seemed like the land of opportunity and, you know, it was Hollywood to me.

Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.

From my point of view, things don’t have to change to get better. Things are fantastic.

The stronger a brand’s point of view, the greater its voltage.

To procrastinate seems inherent in man, for if you do to-day that you may enjoy to-morrow it is but deferring the enjoyment; so that to be idle or industrious, vicious or virtuous, is but with a view of procrastinating the one or the other.

Racist, sexist, and homophobic thoughts cannot, alas, be abolished by fiat but only by the time-honored methods of persuasion, education and exposure to the other guy’s-or excuse me, woman’s-point of view.

When you’re making a critical decision, you have to understand how it’s going to be interpreted from all points of view. Not just your point of view, not just the person you’re talking to, but the people that aren’t in the room. Everybody else.

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It’s just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different.

You know, God, the power that makes life, whatever it is, had just to make two things, masculine and feminine, for all this mischief. And made them so there is this entirely different point of view about love and sex