100 Quotes by Kalki Koechlin

I don't believe in becoming famous overnight.

As a teenager, I was very awkward in my skin. I was never in the cool gang. I had braces and was quite the geek as well as a tomboy.

My mum was quite strict, so I was in a very strict household.

I was born in Pondicherry. Both my parents are French. They met in Pondicherry in the '70s, got married, and stayed back in India.

At home, my parents were quite old, so the surrounding was of elder people. There was no noise. Reading books was encouraged; TV was not encouraged, so I was the geeky, studious type of girl.

Now I know Hindi, and I can read and write Hindi, but the problem is that I can't improvise when I am acting because I think in English, so I have to translate my thinking from English to Hindi, and therefore, I speak slowly.

In India, you can just show up at a friend's house, and they will feed you; you can borrow someone's clothes and touch each other. In London, they would say, 'Oh, let's meet for coffee at 4:15, and we will talk about, I don't know, this play that we saw.'

There is always going to be depth and layers to people and that's what interests me in a character: when there is some problem to overcome, when there is a complication to understand in a person.

Once I wanted to get into films, I took my time about it because when I first got to Bombay, I gave my photos and CDs to all the production houses. But the roles that came my way were the 'typical white girl dancing in the background' kind of roles, which I was not too interested in, or it was advertisements.