You like someone, you court each other, you get into a relationship. You're answerable to each other. Whereas, the non-answerability of dating, my God, I don't know if I would ever be able to.

Financial independence is paramount. My mom always says that when a woman is financially independent, she has the ability to live life on her own terms. I think that was the soundest advice that I ever got. No matter where you go in life or who you get married to, you have to be financially independent - whether you use it or not.

When I was 13, I would come visit my aunt and uncle in New York. I decided I wanted to live with them after seeing my cousin's school. Honestly, I just wanted to go to a school where I didn't have to wear uniforms, and my mom said okay.

I have a very eclectic taste when it comes to music.

It is in my nature to give the work I have all the discipline and due diligence that I am capable of.

I got into the movies by accident. When I got an offer, I thought, 'Let's try this, too.' Everything in my life has happened by trial and error. I didn't even think I would win the Miss India title, so where's the question of thinking I'd come this far.

When I was little, my dad used to call me 'Bandarella,' because I was a mess - a Bandar is a monkey in Hindi. I was not a girly-girl and would always break something and would be running around and didn't really fit in.

I lost my dad two years ago to cancer, and before he died, I asked him to write 'Daddy's Little Girl' on a piece of paper for me. I told him it was for an album. He practiced and practiced and then sent it to me, and I had it tattooed onto my wrist and surprised him with it. He cried when he saw it, happy tears. This way I always carry him with me.

I have great Indian genes! You know, I'm lazy. I want to take advantage of the fact that I have a great metabolism. When I start getting fat, I'll work on it! I like food, and I don't like the gym, and as long as I look like this without doing anything, why bother?

All serious daring starts from within.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.

Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.

I think good art does come from a dark place.

The whole point of me doing a Christmas record and what I centered it around was the song 'Christmas with You' from the point-of-view of the soldiers in Iraq.

The first guitar I ever got was for my 13th birthday.

My wife and I have built trust with our children and have always had open communication.

I mean I was famous for nothing.

Yes, all my songs come from personal experience and relationships.

I'm thankful for serendipitous moments in my life, where things could've gone the other way.

When someone pursues music through your music, that's the greatest accolade anybody can get.

I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.

I was a happy kid up until I hit the teen years.

They were marketing me as a teen idol, when the stuff on the record was not what teen idols were doing at the time.

When I go to an art gallery and stand in front of a painting, I don't want someone telling me what I should be seeing or thinking; I want to feel whatever I feel, see whatever I see, and figure out what I figure out.

There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

It is almost everywhere the case that soon after it is begotten the greater part of human wisdom is laid to rest in repositories.

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.

One must judge men not by their opinions, but by what their opinions have made of them.

Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

Life is but thought.

Beauty, more than bitterness, makes the heart break.

Oh who can tell the range of joy or set the bounds of beauty?

Though I know he loves me, tonight my heart is sad; his kiss was not so wonderful as all the dreams I had.

Wisdom is not acquired save as the result of investigation.

When I can look life in the eyes, grown calm and very coldly wise, life will have given me the truth, and taken in exchange - my youth.

Life has loveliness to sell, all beautiful and splendid things, blue waves whitened on a cliff, soaring fire that sways and sings, and children's faces looking up, holding wonder like a cup.

To be is to be the value of a variable.

There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

An education system suits some more than others. It can lead you out into life or lead you on a wild goose chase. It can help to make you miserable, or dull and nasty and insipid, or profoundly stupid in the special way that 'brainy' people can be.

In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne.

A street full of electric light is a sign of civic failure and is an insulting injury to the soul. Shutting out the night is as disastrous as shutting out the light.

The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination.