I'm not superstitious about good luck charms and all that. I don't have any ring or any tangible thing as a charm. But I like to have at least one of my parents with me during my shows. It gives me strength to find their faces... or my brothers... in the audience. It comforts me.

I'm not a gadget freak, so to say. I own an iPhone, which I love, and would sorely love to upgrade to MacBook Air from my current MacBook Pro. But what gets me going is the technology behind the gadgets, new websites, new apps. And I'm way too much into social media - FB, Twitter and Instagram are always open on my phone.

My parents being Bengali, we always had music in our house. My nani was a trained classical singer, who taught my mum, who, in turn, was my first teacher. Later I would travel almost 70 kms to the nearest town, Kota, to learn music from my guru Mahesh Sharmaji, who was also the principal of the music college there.

I'd say, for me, it's cooking that gives me a space beyond music. I love food. And somehow, music and food go together so well. Cooking is very therapeutic. That preparation, the fragrance of spices, the wafting aromas - it just sweeps aside my depression, tiredness and name what you may.

A studio is like a meditation room where music is created. And a live performance is the place where the creation of the studio is taken ahead. I love both.

Ideas shape the course of history.

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.

The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and religion.

In the long run we are all dead.

The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.

By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.

Most men love money and security more, and creation and construction less, as they get older.

The disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

I'm a '70s mom, and my daughter is a '90s mom. I know a lot of women my age who are real computer freaks.

My children and their happiness have always been my greatest concern.

If you want to wear long hair or wear that dress, as long as you're not hurting yourself or anybody else, I say do it. If you want to go out and have a romantic, sexy affair, do it.

Being a mom makes you far more compassionate. You have more empathy for people, more love. I was always taught to say thank you, and I'm very grateful. And my kids have that quality, too.

You don't get happy by sitting around going on, 'Oh this is a horrible situation, what to do?' You've got to find the courage to change that. I think change is extremely hard for people.

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

There is something very unique in American iconography about this notion of the pursuit of happiness.

I define the American dream as the ability to imagine a way that you want your life to turn out, and have a reasonable hope that you can achieve that.

My mantra is: Let there be happiness in my soul, and let me share it with the world.

My message is that happiness is the first principle of life. But you must choose it. We all have pain, but suffering is a choice. You can be happier if you make some changes in your life.

Happiness is the first principle of life. Happiness basically means well-being. It is always good and always a choice... We need to make the choice to be happy in a particular situation, just as it is, and at a given moment.

We can live closer to our dreams if we are willing to dream them. And we can create a life as we want it to be.

If we could make our house a home, and then make it a sanctuary, I think we could truly find paradise on Earth.

The home is the center of your soul; it's a total reflection of your inner life. If you have a dreary home, it means you are dark inside.

A home should be an intimate autobiography of the things that you like. One of the things I'm so keen on expressing is that, if you don't do it for yourself, if you're always seeking affirmation from outside, you'll never have a home. It'll just be a house.

Don't feel you have to buy something to sit in or at. Buy something you are emotionally attached to and build your design around that. One Matisse cutout poster could provide you with your whole color scheme!

Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.

The virtue of paganism was strength; the virtue of Christianity is obedience.

The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.

Nothing is farther than earth from heaven; nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

The power of faith will often shine forth the most when the character is naturally weak.

Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.

My greatest pleasure is spending time with my family: my husband and daughter, but also my mother, my three sisters, and their families.

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

The English expression 'to fall asleep' is apt because the transition between waking and sleeping is a gradual drop from one state of being into another: a giving up of full self-consciousness for unconsciousness or for the altered consciousness of dreams.

Most of us accept that although we may believe our dreams to be real events, upon waking, we can tell the difference between nocturnal hallucinations and reality.

Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.

Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future.

It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant.

Every man judges his own happiness and satisfaction with life in terms of his possession or lack of possession of those things that he considers worthwhile and valuable.

Above all, it is not decency or goodness of gentleness that impresses the Middle East, but strength.

No trait is more justified than revenge in the right time and place.