I like friends who have independent minds because they tend to make you see problems from all angles.

For the cinema it's much better to be more concentrated in time. It's an instinctive feeling: I can't put it into words why I feel like that. The film's better if the period is a day or a week or fortnight or a month, so that nobody grows up: everybody's as they were in the beginning.

I can't think of being anything else but what is represented by my films. I am not conscious of being a humanist. It's simply that I am interested in human beings. I would imagine that everyone who makes a film is to some extent interested in human beings... I'm slightly irritated by this constant reference to humanism in my work - I feel that there are other elements also. It's not just about human beings. It's also a structure, a form, a rhythm, a face, a temple, a feeling for light and shade, composition, and a way of telling a story.

Indian art is not one thing. Indian art is so many different schools and styles. (Nevertheless) I think lyricism, the love of nature, the symbolic aspect of art (like showing rain in a few lines of dots in a Rajput miniature) the looking for the essence in natural forms and human forms, and then going for the essence rather than the surface - that I think is primarily what distinguishes Indian art from Western art. Not just Indian art but Eastern art in general. Chinese and Japanese art also, if you come to think about it, have the same qualities as Indian art.

It is the women who are the leaders in change and without their participation poverty can never be removed

Out of all virtues simplicity is my most favorite virtue. So much so that I tend to believe that simplicity can solve most of the problems, personal as well as the world problems. If the life approach is simple one need not lie so frequently, nor quarrel nor steal, nor envy, anger, abuse, kill. Everyone will have enough and plenty so need not hoard, speculate, gamble, hate. When character is beautiful, you are beautiful. That is the beauty of simplicity.

It is our moral failure that we still tolerate poverty.

Non-violence is not a passive idea. It is ethical activism at its political best.

Values are most important. Democratic values have to be instilled from childhood and the child sees at an early stage in life in every situation in society.

I relish simplicity as an all-comprehensive value.