Top 33 Aparna Sen Quotes

It’s so important for me to keep a good house. I take a lot of pleasure in cooking and I think there is a lot in common between cooking and film-making. You put all these ingredients together to make something wholesome. Except the rewards in cooking come a little sooner.

Unless we citizens speak out, unless we are vigilant, democracy cannot fully function.

It’s difficult to do a love scene in Indian cinema. The censors are sitting on top of your head.

I’m very heavily trolled, but one learns to ignore such thing.

I don’t think I have too many filmmaking years left since I hurt my spine and knee.

Mainstream Bengali cinema unashamedly tries to copy Bollywood. They forget that they don’t have the kind of budgets that Hindi filmmakers have.

While I think love is a beautiful emotion, I can’t make simple love stories any more. In the time that I have, I would like to make films about things that move and bother me.

I certainly am a feminist but, in my cinema, I don’t talk about any ‘isms’. I deal only with individuals; even if an ‘ism’ surfaces, it is not underlined.

I hate being late. I am always punctual. In fact, I am known for it.

As it happens, I live in Kolkata; my husband Kalyan lives in New Jersey in USA; our elder daughter lives in Cincinnati – also in USA; my younger daughter lives in Mumbai; my sisters live in Delhi.

You have woman filmmakers, who have a male gaze. They play according to the rules of the patriarchal system and make a success of it.

All human beings are lonely at the core. We come alone, we go alone.

Of course, I write. I have stories to tell. But I don’t want to do superficial stuff any more.

I let the images crowd my mind before I start writing a script.

Every single person is political. I am a Left-liberal and my politics is issue-based.

Sufism states that deep within, everyone is the same.

My self-confidence doesn’t come from my looks.

My personal fave is ‘The Japanese Wife’, because I think I achieved a lot of what I wanted to do. I wanted that Japanese minimalism in the film, which I managed to get somewhat.

I had a turtle that I called Kalidas.

The very act of voting is a political act.

Male filmmakers only need to tap their female selves in order to develop their female gaze as many great filmmakers have done. But why is it important to do so? Because the world has been run by aggressive males and landed itself in a fine mess.

A musical by its very nature doesn’t allow for a lot of nuances.

I only make films when I have something to say.

When I make a film about a woman, it is possible that my feminist politics surfaces somewhere but it is not with the intention of propagating feminism.

Someone should tell the fundamentalists that even Advaita philosophy in Hinduism talks of oneness in all existence.

The fact of the matter is that all true artistes are androgynous by nature, the yin and yang perfectly balanced.

With the kind of money Bollywood directors have, they can at least add drama, gloss and glamour to their films, even if the stories are uninspiring and run-of-the-mill.

Yugant’ is not a feminist film at all. It shows how the disintegration of the marital relationship is part of a greater disintegration all around of us of ecology and values.

We think we can control life by controlling our immediate circumstances. But we can’t!

I feel scenes of sexual intimacy are ruined if the director is embarrassed.

This politics is bound to be reflected in the work of a serious filmmaker. When I make a film, I try to tell a human story to the best of my ability. I do not set out either to preach messages or purely to entertain.

A lot of us were worried that the secular fabric of the country was under threat and it was time that citizens begin to speak out. Hence we called ourselves Citizen Speak India.

I grew up in a film lovers’ family and I have been watching the best of world cinema from age six.