Aasif Mandvi Quotes

"I was born in Mumbai, but I grew up in England, and then my adulthood has been in the States. I'm an American stuffed with an English person with an Indian person inside. I feel like those things kind of inform me in some way, which I think helps me as an actor."

"I did a play called 'Disgraced' in 2012 at Lincoln Center, which ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize. I played the lead character, a Muslim American, who had renounced Islam and became very anti-Islam."

"I've always said I'm the worst representative of Muslim-Americans that's ever existed, because I've been inside more bars than mosques."

"If you don't acknowledge differences, it's as bad as stereotyping or reducing someone."

"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!"

"That's the Indian in me - you must put spices on everything. As a kid, whenever we got sick, my mom would take milk and put turmeric in it. That was our medicine. That was the cure-all. Some people turn to Robitussin."

"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?'"

"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."

"I'm a little bit like a turducken: I'm sort of like an Indian person, wrapped in a British person, wrapped in an American kind of thing."

"When I was 11 my friend's mom made a peanut butter sandwich. I ate the sandwich and was like, 'I'm never eating anything else again.' And I still eat peanut butter every day. I would put peanut butter on a steak."

"I'm not really a food connoisseur."

"Being American and being an outsider at the same time, it's a perspective I often bring to a character."

"I figure if people don't want to make the distinction between a Muslim and a terrorist, then why should I make a distinction between good scared white people and racists?"

"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."

"Traditional television as we have known it will make love to the Internet and have a child. That child will be the future. It's already happening, and it's hot!"

"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."

"The artist never really has any control over the impact of his work. If he starts thinking about the impact of his work, then he becomes a lesser artist."

"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."

"An artist's job is simply to take the mirror in front of your face and hold it there. It's not to give you any answers. It is simply to take that mirror and point it at you."

"I was born in India - but never really lived there."

"I'm Muslim the way many of my Jewish friends are Jewish: I avoid pork, and I take the big holidays off."

"When you're brown and Indian, you get offered a lot of doctor roles."

"I rarely went to the mosque, I never fasted, and I only prayed namaaz on the holy nights because my mom bugged me about it."

"The longer I spent time on 'The Daily Show,' standing in front of a green screen pretending to report from war zones and hot spots around the world - most often from somewhere in the Middle East - the more I began to realize that 'The Daily Show' was radicalizing me."

"My tenure at 'The Daily Show' started during the decade after September 11, and fear of Muslims was at an all-time high. Politicians and the media seemed to dial the fright, mistrust, and animosity up to a fever pitch to gain votes and ratings."

"The pleasure from acting comes from having great writing to work with. If it's well written and the character is interesting, then, as an actor, that's the raw material I need."

"In order to change the conversation about Muslims in American media, we need a diverse, unified movement of people who are willing to take a stand against anti-Muslim bias."

"Religion is so much more than the god you pray to. The religion that you associate with, it's culture, it is family, it is background. That is something that I have always grown up with."

"When you're a standup comic, you get up and you try stuff, and you're always kind of seeing how far you can push things."

"I think I would like to see more roles for South Asian performers that are more inclusive and part of the American Diaspora, the American tapestry, perhaps the way that African American and Hispanic roles have developed."