“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.”

I know the Gospel according to Mark better than I know any sura in the Quran.

In America, you have this kind of individualism and in the West, essentially, you have this individualism – this idea of my own personal fulfillment.

You can get samosas in any pub in England today, pretty much. So, “Gunga Din” has come back.

I think that hijacks the spirituality and beauty that exists within Islam. I believe in allowing Islam to be seen in context and in its entirety and being judged on what it really is, not what you think it is.

Bradford specifically there were a lot of Pakistanis there. Even today it has a very large Pakistani population.It was something that I experienced

If people invited Muslims into their home every week by way of a TV show would go a long way to making people feel comfortable with Muslims and countering misconceptions about who we are. Plus, of course, that will make it easier for us to impose sharia law across America.

Samantha Bee said to me when I first started on the “Daily Show”, she was like no – there is no – the only way you’ll learn this job is by doing this job.

For anybody who’s ever been on the other end of, like, racial violence logic is not something that can be used.

In America, people think being South Asian is still kind of exotic. When you go outside New York and Chicago and L.A., there are people who have never tried Indian food… they’ve never even tasted it!

I was born in India – but never really lived there.

If you choose to be a Muslim then you believe that it is on some level wrong to show the image of the Prophet Muhammad.

This was in the ’70s and there was a lot of racism towards South Asians and there was a lot of hazing and bullying and racism that really probably shaped me in some way in terms of, like, wanting to get out of there.

Getting chased home from the bus stop after school by English kids, boarding school, being targeted for praying to what they call Allah wallah ding dong.

I think Islam has been hijacked by the idea that all Muslims are terrorists; that Islam is about hate, about war, about jihad

I think I discovered my first, you know, my first image of a naked woman was sort of sneaking a peek at one of those magazines that was in my dad’s store.

The experience of being on a show that is very much in the center of popular culture is exciting. You really feel like you’re reaching people.