Kumail Nanjiani Quotes

One time, I went to an audition, and I stated my name, and the lady was like, 'Oh, that name sounds really familiar. I've seen you on TMZ.' Her first perception of me was what she had heard.

My only experience with American things is through movies.

For a subject worked and reworked so often in novels, motion pictures, and television, American Indians remain probably the least understood and most misunderstood Americans of us all.

Because people have read those things in the newspapers, they think it is true. Ten years ago all these things I have just mentioned would have upset me.

Because when you watch U.S. television, all the presenters and reporters, they're all out of central casting.

I don't think you realize how often on television people are not like anyone we know or have known.

The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.

Russia is very big and very varied. People are different in different regions.

For me, it's a real shock to see American mainstream films. I can't see these films because it's always the same thing to me. This is very American. Violence is very American, and I can't understand these films. Why do they use violence? To show what? Masculinity? To show fear? Defense? What are you showing with all this violence?

And hey-the psychiatrist in the show is Italian also. So people are going to focus on what they want to focus on. There's not much you can do about that.

What I hope to do in the States is to break up this stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs. I mean, we are basically the only sub-culture that is not represented in Hollywood. And it's funny because everybody is talking about the Muslim world and the Arab world, and we are not represented.

The image of one country and its people amongst peoples of another country is largely created and sustained by the media.

How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue allowed such a destructive and parodied image of itself to become the intellectual coin of the realm overseas?

I wish reporters were more in tune to the difference between the Asian experience and the Asian-American experience. I think often they lump the two together and think that when I talk about Asian-American narratives that they can cite 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' or 'Mulan' as proof of concept when it's a different experience.

The press creates a caricature.

If you're someone who doesn't have Muslim friends, and your only experience of Islam is what you see on the news - the angry man with a beard doing or saying something terrible - then you may inadvertently associate that with Islam and think that is what it's all about.

I'd be so fascinated to talk to a psychologist or sociologist about the deep psychological impact of seeing oneself represented. I don't think we've really touched the surface of what it does to the psyche of a people if the only image of you out there is negative. Or if it's never out there.

Midwestern Jews is a different community, is a different thing than New York Jews, L.A. Jews. It's just different. It's the whole Midwestern thing.

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.

Culture is this thing that exists apart from our real life but is something we all have tacitly agreed to in America. And what film and television do, particularly in this country, is lay out the characters involved in this invisible agreement and dictate who and what can participate.

The more I come to know about the outside world's perception of China, the more I feel there are all sorts of misunderstandings, and to a certain extent, people do not get the full picture from the media. A lot of foreigners have few opportunities to visit China, and a lot of Chinese people do not have the chance to go to Europe or to the West.

To mistake Midland for the volk heartland is the West Texas equivalent of assuming that Greenwich, Connecticut, is Levittown.

The people who relate to Playboy, both readers and people who produce it, are not the way the critics think they are.

If you think of human experience as a pie, then the wedge Hollywood is reflecting now is getting smaller and smaller.

We get the impression through film and TV that Americans are violent gangsters with guns or upper-middle-class people in romcoms. I really liked the people. They were really warm. They could have been Brits. I mean that in the nicest possible way.