And Then One Day Quotes

“there is no such thing as talent but there is such a thing as lack of talent, and lack of talent occurs when one is not in one’s right place’.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“The marvellous Stellan Skarsgard with whom I once acted, in an utterly unmemorable film, had remarked to me at the time, ‘Isn’t being an actor wonderful? You are paid to stay a child.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“Anyway, academic rock-bottom was hit when in the final exams of Class 9 I fared abysmally and actually gave in my trigonometry paper empty, with an inscription that I hoped would amuse the examiner: ‘If you know the answers, why ask me? And if you don’t, how do you expect me to?”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“I have been grappling for years with the question of whether experiencing difficulty dealing with real life is what drives people to become actors.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“... and then one day you find ten years have got behind you, no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun’ — Pink Floyd, ‘Time’, Dark Side of the Moon”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“So vulgar in fact that with a couple of weeks’ per diem I purchased a laptop and hired a man to teach me how to switch it on.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“once actually having a director testily tell me, ‘Naseerji this is not an art film, here you have to ACT!”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“The surfeit of aesthetics everywhere began to give me indigestion and to behold a faceless rectangular apartment block there was actually a relief.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“One Actor, one Audience with the roles interchangeable’ had now become ‘Actor and Audience are one’.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“His intention was not ‘to burden the Actor with skills, the skills must be taken for granted’; what he said he tried to do was ‘rid the Actor of everything that prevents him from being himself’. I don’t think the problem of learning acting has ever been put so succinctly,”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“I learnt later of course that the ‘unconventional actor’ had been their third or fourth choice and he was only cast when the stars they wanted turned down the part.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“In fact, my only reason for watching Hindi potboilers now is to catch the subtexts passing between the actors.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“Post-dinner, we were headed down the steps when a power failure turned everything pitch black. Everyone except Mr Mittal stopped dead in their tracks. When told why, he continued down the steps chuckling, ‘Well, follow me then!”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“had not yet encountered the priceless gem ‘even the ugly character has to be handsome ugly’, passed on to me sometime later by Mr Subhash Ghai.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“Regret?’ he growled. ‘I did what I chose to do. I’m not an actor, I’m a missionary and my mission is to spread Shakespeare.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“opposite Bhakti Barve who I still consider the finest female theatre actor I have seen in my life.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“Before shooting Nishant Shyam had given me the most valuable piece of advice regarding film acting I have ever received: ‘The camera is the eye of everyone watching the film,”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“Getting a picture taken when we were children was an event: everyone dressed up and posed stiffly, there was the delicious wait for the negatives to develop and then the bliss of seeing the pictures.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“Today’s generation, whose every sound and action is recorded from the time of their birth, and for whom the camera is part of the family, will find it hard to understand how just being photographed was such a big deal for us but it was, and for me in particular, desperate as I was to see what I really looked like,”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“And later when she was being fed and I was being ignored I, like all immature fathers, experienced the most intense jealousy which only men ever feel, jealousy of their own child.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“And I fully endorse Satyadev Dubey’s view that Mr Pran Sikand was ‘the best bad actor in the world’.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“I did not even have the satisfaction of being rejected.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“It was a cold rainy day, the mist was deep, I was bundled into a Duckback raincoat and rubber cap and I was carrying my bag in my other hand. I’ve always had ambivalent feelings about mist since. Beautiful yes, but also chilling; and there’s nothing ambivalent about my feeling for school bags—I still hate the damn things.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“The finest definition of theatre that I have come across is ‘one actor-one audience’.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“Films take you captive, they feed you everything on a plate, the legerdemain they create transports you into a state where you may as well be dreaming, but theatre takes you into a world where your imagination is stimulated, your judgement is unimpaired, and thus your enjoyment heightened.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir

“first wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first’.”
― Naseeruddin Shah, And Then One Day: A Memoir