Explorer Quotes

"The key to making healthy decisions is to respect your future self. Honor him or her. Treat him or her like you would treat a friend or a loved one. A Stanford study showed that those who saw a photo of their future self made smarter financial decisions."

"I have little shame, no dignity - all in the name of a better cause."

"I was what they call 'skinny fat' - a body that resembled a python after swallowing a goat."

"It's sort of my job to feel good."

"I tried the paleo diet, which is the caveman diet - lots of meat. And I tried the calorie restriction diet: The idea is that if you eat very, very little - if you're on the verge of starvation, you will live a very long time, whether or not you want to, of course."

"I was very good at sitting. But I just read so much research about how horrible sitting is for you. It's like, it's really bad. It's like Paula-Deen-glazed-bacon-doughnut bad. So I now move around as much as possible."

"The best we can do, to paraphrase Pollan, is to eat whole foods, mostly plants, and not too much."

"I pledged to become the world's greatest expert in a field I knew nothing about."

"My goal? To test out every diet and exercise regimen on planet earth and figure out which work best. I sweated, I cooked, I learned to pole dance. In the end, I lost weight, lowered my cholesterol and doubled my energy level. I feel better than I ever have."

"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."