On March 4th, 1830, I arrived in London, where a new world seemed opened to me.

I live in a world where there's magazines and blogs, and people feel like they are allowed to criticize me, and in the meanest way.

I want a world where everything is welcome, everything is valid, everything is acknowledged, embraced, and accepted. To me, that's a perfect world.

There's a part of me that feels like it gets really frustrating to keep working in the manner that I made the book 'Shortcomings,' where everything is pretty accurate to the real world.

The cities that I go to where I can tell that they have a lot of different types of drag, I tell them that they remind me of Brooklyn, and I mean that as the highest compliment in the entire world.

For me, being with Obama or having dinner with Bill Clinton... it's crazy. It's mind-blowing, because where I come from is just another world. We were just ignored by politicians - by America in general.

I sometimes feel that the world is a very uncivilised place where it is meant to be at its most civilised. Where it's meant to be intellectual or artistic or compassionate, it isn't, and that makes me very angry.

Someone told me about drama schools, and they seemed like mythological places - you can really go and be in drama classes all day? I inadvertently entered into this world where people wore bicycle clips and did song-and-dance routines in the corridors.

The writer, Ruth Jhabvala, livedin India but was German. My partner Ismail Merchant was from Bombay but was educated in England and he had a different view on the world. Probably they had to contend with some sort of Oregonian-ness in me that they didn't understand and didn't know where it was coming from.

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