Quotes by Ismail Merchant

• This is one of his most human and most amusing and witty novels. The characters are very Indian. I decided that I wanted to do a comedy, so this was just the right one.
• Well, I am from India and I wanted to make films in English for the international market in India. So that was really the main thing, and then of course economically it was cheaper to make films in India.
• We have gotten some terrible reviews at times but if we depended on the judgment of the studios or critics, we never would have made more than one movie.
• Well, the musicals give emphasis to love, longing, melancholy, sadness. All of that is always there.
• Urdu can not die out because it has very strong roots in Persia. The language itself is not only just the language of the Muslims, but it's also the language of the Hindus.
• It's about a young man who has climbed to fame and he discovers that his writing and the relationship with his wife are really more important for him than anything else.
• It's about a father and daughter and the daughter's friend and her relationship with her current husband.
• A few words of Hindi appear here or there, but it's all Urdu. I feel that if the popular culture, which is what Hindi films are, uses Urdu, it's not going to diminish.
• I feel very proud that we have managed to stay together. In these forty years we have made forty-six films. Each one has brought a certain name and contribution to cinema.
• The mixture of the Trinidadian people and the Indian people has caused a new culture to emerge.