When you play music, you don't need a language. Music is a language.

My topics are timely. When an event is happening is when I want to be there... I think it is our duty to challenge the status quo.

I hope I can make Pakistan proud by bringing home an Oscar.

Fighting the Taliban and the various radical organizations on the front lines is like adding a Band-Aid to a cut, it may stop the bleeding but unless you clean it with antiseptic, the germs stay and multiply.

Where I grew up in Pakistan, it's really the luck of the draw. My mother got married when she was 17. She never went to college but she wanted each and every one of us to go to college and then work. She was relentless about it. And i think that part of who i am is shaped by her strength. If [girls] families support them, they can achieve their dreams

An Academy Award nomination is stuff dreams are made of.

I feel that for the first time in a long time, educated Pakistanis are returning to their country to start up educational projects, to start up businesses, so instead of the brain-drain that happened in the 1950s and 1960s, the country is growing and improving economically.