Entertainer Quotes

"People saw me as just a singer - yeah, a pretty face who could sing - and not more than that."

"Cats and I have an understanding, but we choose not to interact often."

"I had an acting teacher tell me once that if you're playing a car salesman, you don't want to be an OK car salesman, you want to play the best car salesman."

"Singing for stage, if you don't hear yourself, that's when you push, and that's when you can hurt your voice sometimes. So if I can hear myself in my ear, it really helps me to find that balance of how loud I needed to be singing."

"Being onstage is just a feeling that you cannot duplicate anywhere else because the energy that the audience is giving you forces you to give more energy. It's such an output and exchange of energy. You can't do that anywhere else."

"I can clap with one hand."

"I was a very awkward high schooler, especially in early high school."

"'Rent' was my first professional job, ever."

"I grew up about 60 miles northwest of New York, in Middletown, NY."

"I watch a lot of television. I always have."

"I just feel like I have a lot to prove."

"I was very unsure about what I wanted to do in high school."

"I didn't grow up a theatre kid, going to theatre camps. I played sports, and that was my main direction. But luckily, I never had to choose between sports and theatre."

"I still sing every day - in the shower or on the set all day. I'm sure everyone will tell you that I never shut up. But it's not in the capacity that I would like to."

"It's every actor's dream to work in a hit show on Broadway and also shoot a television show."

"After 9/11, the amount of applicants the FBI received increased exponentially. Whereas you used to require a college degree, and it was a small group of people who were just out of college, after 9/11, it changed."

"I watched so many movies when I was a kid, and I'd watch them over and over."

"I listen to all kinds of music, but I've always been a really big fan of Top 40 radio. If I'm in my car, that's what I listen to."

"Coming from a background of being onstage, you're onstage for two and a half hours and you're in it for the whole time no matter what you're doing. Even if you don't have a line, you have to stay in it."

"Once I came to acting, it was almost a thing where there weren't enough hours in the day to work on stuff because I was so passionate about it."

"Awards are not something that I measure my work by. I've been so fortunate and I've gotten to do such terrific things that it seems petty to look back and say, 'Oh, I should have gotten that prize.' I don't look at it that way."

"I would like to, especially in film, play against type and do some heavier stuff. I'm intrigued by projects that deal with problematic people and things."

"I like auditioning! A lot of people hate it, but I like it."

"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?'"