Ajay Naidu

“I think that I have sold out sometimes.”

“I want to present interesting stories that don't qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.”

“I think that rap is narrative, when it's done right.”

“My family was very supportive of my acting. They didn't really have a choice because I got jobs acting before anyone could really say anything. It paid my way through college and helped my family out.”

“When you get to play with the big boys, your game improves drastically.”

“The camera is interested in what you are thinking as opposed to just what you are doing or saying.”

“The turntable is now an instrument at the Smithsonian.”

“I love films for the fact that it is like working under a microscope. It is sort of like a laboratory.”

“I got heavily into the drum-and-bass scene, which is really wicked.”

“All India radio was worldwide.”

“I had been working early in my life in films - since I was 11.”

“Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.”

“Acting school was summer camp, and I needed concentration camp. I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.”

“Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing. Actors are physical, olympian storytellers and we should be able to create entire landscapes with nothing.”

“My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young. I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.”

“The loneliness is when you pick up and move, even if you are not originally from that place, and you have some memories that you want to embrace. Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window.”

“I knew I was happy when I was dancing.”

“America makes up its own mind about what it wants to see.”

“There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold.”

“I like the theatre because you paint with broad strokes. To me the theatre is stretching its definition really far.”