“We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.”

Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.

Things change and work changes. Right now I like the idea of enveloping a space and getting messages across that connect to the world in ways that seem familiar but are different.

I’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.

I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.

It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it

Love is something you fall into.

I’d always been a news junkie, always read lots of newspapers and watched the Sunday morning news shows on TV and felt strongly about issues of power, control, sexuality and race.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It’s scary.

I’m an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author’s rendition of events and circumstances.

It’s really hard for me to use the term ‘history’ in the singular, because it suggests a reductivist view of how moments and events congeal and reflect the passage of time. I’d rather stick to the pluralness of ‘histories’ in order to suggest the simultaneity, the parallel forces at work, which produce lived experience.

There’s a moment of recognition. It’s that white-light kind of stuff that just “works.” I love that. And you know it when it happens, whether it’s a movie, music, a building, a book.

I think there are different ways of being rigorous, and I am asking people to be as rigorous in their pleasure as in their criticism.

I just say I’m an artist who works with pictures and words.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

I think there are lots of ways to make good work. You can throw big bucks at a project and make what some would call crap, or you can work very modestly with eloquently moving results.

Language does not make one an elite.

There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language.

Sloppy language leads to sloppy thought, and sloppy thought to sloppy legislation.

I don’t see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty – and evaporating quickly.

There are two languages that I love: Farsi and Panjabi. Because the depth of Sufi thought in these two languages cannot be found in any other language.

I am lucky that the Western world chooses me to play roles in their movies an television, whatever language it may be.

My first language, the true language of the soul spoken only on our planet of origin, had no word for betrayal or traitor. Or even loyalty- because without the opposite, the concept had no meaning.

English is clipped in speech. Texas is exactly the opposite.