As filmmakers, you're not working on just one project, you're producing something, directing something, shooting something, and so it becomes hard to do it by yourself.

It doesn't matter who you are or where you come from - if you put quality work out there, it will be appreciated.

What good is my parents' wealth and education and upbringing if I'm not contributing to the world?

I'd like to do a film in Canada, but it's too difficult. National Film Board funding takes too long, and there's too much paperwork; by the time the film is approved the topic is dead and gone.

I became a documentary filmmaker because I wanted to make socially conscious films. I never studied filmmaking - everything I have learned has been on the field.

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

By bringing the voices of the ordinary people faced with extraordinary challenges to television screens around the world, I hope to affect change in one community at a time.

The Pakistani government and its allies must overhaul their policies in Pakistan.

An Academy Award nomination is stuff dreams are made of.

Don't give up your dreams.

I'm generally quite an angry person, and I like to channel my anger toward something creative.

Every life will be better if God is at the center of it

You must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessings.

Alcohol is a pervasive fact of life, but an extraordinary fact-pleasurable and destructive, anathematized and adulated, and deeply ambiguous ... the genie in the bottle.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

One of the principal qualities that you need as national security adviser is trust, the trust of the president. And that depends on truth and it depends on honesty.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

Leap out of the frying pan into the fire.

When people call me either a girl crush or their best friend, like, the best friend they want, that's, to me, the best compliment anyone could ever give me.

People don't want to hang around someone that you don't know how they're going to react to anything you do or say.

It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.