When people ask me about what I learned from martial arts, I don't talk about favorite punches or kicks, or about fights won or lost. I talk about learning self-discipline, about ethics and manners and benevolence and fairness.
My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.
I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it.
I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.
My father always taught me to never be quiet. That's the good thing about a Bengali household.
Whenever I get married, it will be a Bengali wedding. If I won't have a Bengali wedding, my mother won't come. She has warned me. So, I am going to have a Bengali wedding for sure.
With Benghazi, I don't see anyone saying, 'Hey look, I am overall responsible for this and therefore, I take responsibility for what happened. It's my fault.' I haven't heard that yet. Meanwhile, the other side of the coin, the Osama bin Laden raid, it seems everyone made that decision, and that's just unbelievable to me.
To me, Arnold was a pioneer in the spirit of Thomas Edison or Benjamin Franklin, while Tiger is a pioneer in the spirit of Bill Gates.
For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.
When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me. So when David Fincher comes along and wants to direct 'The Social Network,' when Bennett Miller comes along and wants to direct 'Moneyball,' or when Danny Boyle wants to direct 'Jobs'? Hallelujah. I want them directing it.
Tony Bennett and me are all the same... and he's still singing. I don't know what else to do.
I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives.
People ask me if I ever get sick of playing 'Daydream Believer' or whatever. But I don't look at it that way. Do they ask if Tony Bennett is tired of 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco?'
Thanks to Coach Bennett for a great education in basketball and for making me better.
I would not want to live in a country that would have me as a leader in any sort of political bent.
Then, when I was a senior in high school, I was kind of bereft and she put me in an acting class.
Ingrid Bergman made an enormous impression on me. I couldn't imagine where that kind of acting talent came from.
I was going to design sports cars, but my father came to my college to visit me. At the time he was making a picture in Sweden and he took me there with him. I got to see Ingmar Bergman's company and I thought, 'Gee, filmmaking is a lot more fun than sports cars,' so I decided to follow him and go into acting.
If people ask me, 'For you, what is your most important film?' I have a feeling that they all sort of want me to answer with one of the Bergman films. But I cannot choose.
A movie that I've seen probably the most is 'Fanny & Alexander,' the Ingmar Bergman movie. I even dragged my friends to the super long version that had an intermission. I don't know how much they liked me that day.
