“It is ironic that it doesn’t matter how successful I am in any other capacity. Ultimately, my parents marker is do you have a wife? And do you have children?”

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.

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.

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 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.

Reality also is that there are a lot of gaps, there are a lot of business in between the iconic things.

Sometimes when it comes to the iconic kind of moments, when I read the script for the first time, you get little goose bumps or something because it really is kind of exciting.

Doing a remake of an iconic song is always nerve-racking because you never know if you can actually do justice to it.

Armani is a fashion house that I think is iconic and beautiful.

I want to be remembered as iconic and different.