Particularly in the final stages I always find that I'm rushed. It's dangerous when you're rushed in the editing stage, most of my early films are flawed in the cutting.

Well the Bombay film wasn't always like how it is now. It did have a local industry. There were realistic films made on local scenes. But it gradually changed over the years.

The director is the only person who knows what the film is about.

My cameraman and I devised a method, which we started using from my second film, which applies mainly to day scenes shot in the studio, where we used bounced light instead of direct light. We agreed with this thing of four or five shadows following the actors is dreadful.

When I write an original story I write about people I know first-hand and situations I'm familiar with. I don't write stories about the nineteenth century.

Particularly in the final stages I always find that I'm rushed. It's dangerous when you're rushed in the editing stage, most of my early films are flawed in the cutting.

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

It was only after Pather Panchali had some success at home that I decided to do a second part. But I didn't want to do the same kind of film again, so I made a musical.

I've made seventeen or eighteen films now, only two of which have been original screenplays, all the others have been based on short stories or novels, and I find the long short story ideal for adaptation.

What is attempted in these film is of course a synthesis. But it can be seen by someone who has his feet in both cultures. Someone who will bring to bear on the films involvement and detachment in equal measure.

Ever since Two Daughters I've been composing my own music.

Sometimes a director is making three films. Perhaps he is shooting a film in Madras and a film in Bombay and he can't leave Madras as some shooting has to be done, so he directs by telephone. The shooting takes place. On schedule.

I was interested in both Western and Indian classical music.

The only solutions that are ever worth anything are the solutions that people find themselves.

I wouldn't mind taking a rest for three or four months, but I have to keep on making films for the sake of my crew, who just wait for the next film because they're not on a fixed salary.

My films play only in Bengal, and my audience is the educated middle class in the cities and small towns. They also play in Bombay, Madras and Delhi where there is a Bengali population.

You cannot go beyond a certain limit in your expenditure if you want to bring back money from your local market, which is very small after Pakistan.

The conception of background music is changing. You use less and less of it these days.

Most of the top actors and actresses may be working in ten or twelve films at the same time, so they will give one director two hours and maybe shoot in Bombay in the morning and Madras in the evening. It happens.

I think they quite like me when I work because I'm one of the safer directors to back, because even if my films don't bring their costs in back home, once they're shown outside of India they manage to cover the costs.

When I'm shooting on location, you get ideas on the spot - new angles. You make not major changes but important modifications, that you can't do on a set. I do that because you have to be economical.

There's always some room for improvisation.

I mix Indian instruments with Western instruments all the time.

I had developed this habit of writing scenarios as a hobby. I would find out which stories had been sold to be made into films and I would write my own treatment and then compare it.

There is a ban on Indian films in Pakistan, so that's half of our market gone.

If the theme is simple, you can include a hundred details that create the illusion of actuality better.

I love clothes. No brands want to dress me.

Few nations have been so poor as to have but one god. Gods were made so easily, and the raw material cost so little, that generally the god market was fairly glutted and heaven crammed with these phantoms.

In consequence of inventing machines, men will be devoured by them.

I was looking for what the meaning of life was.

The problem of suffering is: why is there the suffering we know?

Bride and groom are not just two contracting parties but two loving and beloved companions joined in establishing a home that will be nothing less than a source of immortality.

Modeling is a lot of fun, but I prefer acting. It's so much fun to get to play different characters and transform into someone else for a while.

Raffles are no fun.

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.

It is important to understand the continuing, confused fascination with the Second World War. For most of us, the great unspoken question is how would we have behaved in the face of danger and when forced to make major moral choices.

So I wanna see all of you making out during this song.

I love flying and kind of just fascinated with it, and to fly something like an F-22 would be a blast.

I enjoyed being in California for a while. But that's the thing about London: you can't really shake it. I've always had the impression when I was in L.A. for long periods of time that simultaneously my life was happening somewhere else, and I'm missing it.

The ideal way to win a championship is step by step.

A film is not something that can be made over the phone or Skype. Creative people meet, spend time together, and then come up with something.

There's something about a divorce in that even if your parents still love you, the fact that they can't live with each other makes you feel there's something wrong with you.

If the guy out in the woods with the Michigan Militia is a real estate negotiator, instead of some crackpot, and has a normal life, that's unnerving. You don't want to think it's as normal as the guy next door, hedging his lawn. It's easier to demonize or separate them off from 'us.'

Our specious present as such is very short. We do, however, experience passing events; part of the process of the passage of events is directly there in our experience, including some of the past and some of the future.

If there was ever a man born to be a hitter it was me.

There are libertarian conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and social conservatives. I feel conservative in terms of limited government, individual responsibility, self-sufficiency - that sort of thing.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

The pleasure of work is open to anyone who can develop some specialised skill, provided that he can get satisfaction from the exercise of his skill without demanding universal applause.

I have an unfortunate personality.