Mira Nair Quotes

Author Image

Mira Nair

Profession : Director

Birth : October 15, 1957

'No words - action' was the lesson my mother taught me: as artists, we have the privilege of holding a mirror to the world, to engage, to question, to bring beauty to a complex universe.

Mira Nair

The film-school mantra is that if you don't tell your own stories, nobody will.

Mira Nair

I'm not interested in passion and love for their own sake - without the struggle of life, they're just fluff.

Mira Nair

I think optimism springs from nature. I'm a gardener. Nature has taught me about rhythm, the essence of every art. With so much that is terrible, nature gives me pleasure.

Mira Nair

We have not learned the lessons of 9/11. This wrongful suspicion, racial hatred, and profiling is what I keep seeing.

Mira Nair

I am actually a resident of three worlds - of America, of India, and of Africa. I live in Uganda most of the year. It's extraordinary to have that worldview that is an expansive one rather than just looking at the world from where you sit.

Mira Nair

Either you're this, or you're that: either you're - if you're a Pakistani, you're a terrorist; if you're an American, you might be a militarist. Those kind of prisms that we see each other through are really stultifying, and they don't often show the complexity and the incredible warmth and encompassing of the world.

Mira Nair

I don't want to say that we are the world in that we are not distinct from each other. I want to say that the humanity that is our foundation is common, but my culture, my beliefs, my values, what makes me sing and what makes me happy and the language I speak in and the relationships I have in the world are distinctive.

Mira Nair

I think I am kind of put on this Earth to speak of being between worlds in my films.

Mira Nair

I listen to music deeply and seriously for at least an hour or two a day.

Mira Nair

To make films, you have to have something to say. To have something to say, you have to be a student of life. And to be a student of life, you have to be feeding yourself with what life, politics, society, and your family fuels you with.

Mira Nair

I'm a self-taught landscape gardener; it's a real passion of mine. It's what I do in my spare time because trees don't ask questions!

Mira Nair

In Uganda, I am surrounded, unfortunately, by evangelicals; I can't bear it. Every night I hear the chants of Baptists urging people to be born again.

Mira Nair

We want the diversity of the world that is around us represented both in front of and behind the camera, and on our screens as a result.

Mira Nair

India somehow constantly rivets and inspires me, and I feel very relieved to have come from this country which has a very 'lifeist' approach to living fully, no matter what one has or doesn't have.

Mira Nair

A lot of us feel that we are against the war; we are against profiling and are against what is happening. We are tired of war in every manifestation. American people do not all believe in what the government has been doing.

Mira Nair

My family is vital to me - just the sense of being surrounded by no pretension.

Mira Nair

My close friends call me the bulldozer who never says no. I have never not made a film.

Mira Nair

Sitting in America, we never get to know the other side in any kind of believable way. We have so many movies about Iraq, Afghanistan, and this and that, but there is never a character from that side.

Mira Nair

When people break up, after sharing their entire souls with each other, I don't want to believe that you just switch off. There are remnants of melancholia, and there is so much that stays with you because you loved this person. Of course, it's that much more complicated when it's an interracial love or love from a person from another culture.

Mira Nair