Bombay's Quotes

#1. So, my sweetheart back home writes to me and wants to know what this gal in Bombay's got that she hasn't got. So I just write back to her and says, Nothin', honey. Only she's got it here.

Alvah Bessie

#2. My family and relatives alone could fill Shanmukhananda Hall in Bombay.

Zubin Mehta

#3. We lived in Bombay and we lived in Mumbai and sometimes, I lived in both of them at the same time.

Suketu Mehta

#4. If I wanted, I could have ruled half of Bombay.

Dev Anand

#5. It's the eternal tragedy of being gay in Bombay," I lamented. "Never a place to yourself." With city rents so high, most sons lived with their parents until marriage - and usually well after as well.

Manil Suri

#6. So, what would you like to drink?"
"Aside from you?"
I laughed anxiously. "You can't drink me."
He leaned forward, his eyes running up and down my body, causing my skin to heat. "Yes, I believe I can. And I believe I will. But for now, I'll just have a Bombay and tonic.

Karina Halle

#7. When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn't speak a word of English. In England, people might be very understanding about that, but in Bombay, they're not very forgiving. 'If you don't speak English, how do you expect to work in Hindi films?'

Kangana Ranaut

#8. In Bombay, we have a fine concert hall. I think it is high time we built venues in Delhi and Calcutta, not only for western music, but also Indian music. It doesn't matter which party is in power; don't you think the capital of India should have a concert hall?

Zubin Mehta

#9. Oh my God. I just got dumped by a red headed mortician in a funeral home named Crummy's, after pretending to be a circus freak at a visitation I had just crashed. I was pretty sure there'd be no bouncing back from this. -Dakota Bombay

Leslie Langtry

#10. Having plenty of living space has to be the greatest luxury in a city, and I guess in some sense Bombay is the antithesis of what living in Canada must be.

Aravind Adiga

#11. This is not India. There are people here from every part of India, but Bombay isn't India. Bombay is an own-world, a world in itself. The real India is out there.

Gregory David Roberts

#12. I loved being in Bombay. It was a pretty thrilling place to walk around and explore.

Dan Futterman

#13. More dreams are realised and extinguished in Bombay than any other place in India.

Gregory David Roberts

#14. My films play only in Bengal, and my audience is the educated middle class in the cities and small towns. They also play in Bombay, Madras and Delhi where there is a Bengali population.

Satyajit Ray

#15. I, however, was raised neither as Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was
what's the word these days?
atomised. Yessir: a real Bombay mix.

Salman Rushdie

#16. Having grown up in Bombay, from the day you're born, you have absolute freedom to choose who you want to be.

Freida Pinto

#17. The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, in Bombay, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.

Gregory David Roberts

#18. George Bernard Shaw of England stopped over just long enough to make one speech in Bombay, India, started a war and 100 Indians killed each other. That's what I call good speech-making. The only enthusiasm any of our speakers can rouse is a demand to kill the speaker.

Will Rogers

#19. Sometimes a director is making three films. Perhaps he is shooting a film in Madras and a film in Bombay and he can't leave Madras as some shooting has to be done, so he directs by telephone. The shooting takes place. On schedule.

Satyajit Ray

#20. I'm a pucca Indian. Bombay is my home.

Zubin Mehta

#21. Gin and tonic," Christian says. "Hendricks if you have it or Bombay Sapphire. Cucumber with the Hendricks, lime with the Bombay.

E.L. James

#22. I'm drinking here break motor oil and Bombay gin, I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Warren Zevon

#23. When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language.

Salman Rushdie

#24. I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay

Jeet Thayil

#25. Well the Bombay film wasn't always like how it is now. It did have a local industry. There were realistic films made on local scenes. But it gradually changed over the years.

Satyajit Ray

#26. Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we've loved them, left them, or fought them.

Gregory David Roberts

#27. The incredible length of Bombay sped by, those endless sprawls of buildings, huts and shacks, children squatting and shitting by the tracks, refuse, the crowded grey roads twisting and winding between, all of it blurred but fearsome in its strength, in its very life that grew it unstoppably.

Vikram Chandra

#28. All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay.

Jeet Thayil

#29. See those people holding hands?" he asked at the candlelight vigil outside the still-smoking Taj Hotel. "They're neither Hindus nor Muslims, but citizens of Bombay first.

Manil Suri

#30. 'Bombay Velvet' is my most romantic film, it's my 'Titanic' or 'Gone With The Wind.'

Ranbir Kapoor

#31. Everyone goes on about how Bombay is so similar to New York, so I had see what the big deal was. The bustling crowds are the same, but it's a lot quieter, it's a lot cleaner, and it's not humid. I think the energy is very similar to Bombay.

Tena Desae

#32. Bombay Sapphire and Gogol should never be mixed.

Dan Brown

#33. When I wrote the song, I had the sea near Bombay in mind. We stayed at a hotel by the sea, and the fishermen come up at five in the morning and they were all chanting. And we went on the beach and we got chased by a mad dog - big as a donkey.

Ray Davies

#34. So now that began to develop into a full-fledged shouting match of its own, and all in all it was soon a full-scale old-style Bombay tamasha, with people watching from every balcony and window in every building, up and down the road, laughing and giving advice and yelling at each other.

Vikram Chandra

#35. He looked at me with a smile that I still remember and ran a finger along his impeccably trimmed mustache. Cricket is about a lot more than playing by the rules, Mistry. It's a gentleman's game. Don't you ever forget that.

Ken Doyle

#36. Bombay is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity.

Tahir Shah

#37. In this city, every deserted street corner conceals a crowd. It appears in a minute when something disrupts the way in which the world is supposed to work. It can disappear almost as instantaneously.

Jerry Pinto

#38. When I was in college, my brother, B.R. Chopra, who is everything to me, was a director in Bombay. He taught me filmmaking. What I am today is because of him.

Yash Chopra

#39. If only certain things had been preventable, his life would have unfurled in front of him as intended, like a lush Oriental carpet. No surprises, no detours. Just a thick tapestry of days and nights that at the end of his time on earth, he could roll up and proudly claim as his own.

Shilpa Agarwal

#40. Most of the top actors and actresses may be working in ten or twelve films at the same time, so they will give one director two hours and maybe shoot in Bombay in the morning and Madras in the evening. It happens.

Satyajit Ray

#41. When I did musicals in London a number of years ago, I was in a workshop scenario for a year or more with 'Bombay Dreams.'

Raza Jaffrey

#42. I looked at the people, then, and I saw how busy they were - how much industry and energy described their lives.

Gregory David Roberts

#43. You can take the boy out of Bombay; you can't take Bombay out of the boy, you know.

Salman Rushdie

#44. But no turbulent emotions passed through me as he spoke, only a diluted version of the nauseating sensation that had taken hold the day in Bombay that I learned my mother was dying, a sensation that had dropped anchor in me and never fully left.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#45. Even in India the Hindi film industry might be the best known but there are movies made in other regional languages in India, be it Tamil or Bengali. Those experiences too are different from the ones in Bombay.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

#46. Credit, security passes, and other documents. It was a booming trade in the booming economy of Bombay, and we often worked through the dawn to satisfy the demand. And the business was generational: as licensing authorities and other bodies

Gregory David Roberts

#47. In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.

Salman Rushdie

#48. 'Bombay Velvet' is my first film in a trilogy about Bombay, before it became a metropolis.

Anurag Kashyap

#49. I didn't really enjoy modeling in Bombay. I floated through it in the hopes that I would get my ticket to the next big thing. There was no real joy that I got out of it, to be really honest.

Freida Pinto

#50. 'Salaam Bombay' didn't put a halo on the poor. Instead, it said that they will teach us how to live.

Mira Nair

#51. Magic, the trick that connects the ordinary to the impossible, was the invisible river that ran through every street and beating heart in Bombay in those years, and nothing, from the postal service to the pleading of beggars, worked without a measure of it.

Gregory David Roberts

#52. I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.

Tahir Shah

#53. I've been to Delhi, Madras, Bangalore and a lot of other cities, but I have never seen a crime set-up like that in Bombay.

Gregory David Roberts

#54. One of the many happy things about physics is that it works anywhere in the world. No matter whether you're in Bishop's Lacey or Bombay, friction is friction.

Alan Bradley

#55. The weeks I'd spent in Bombay with Prabaker had taught me that the shaking or wiggling of the head from side to side - that most characteristic of Indian expressive gestures - was the equivalent of a forward nod of the head, meaning Yes.

Gregory David Roberts

#56. I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.

Salman Rushdie

#57. And so, out of bloody-mindedness, I had said the word, and we went for the first time, into those Bombay Central alleys that have no name. Lamba introduced me simply as 'The Moor', and because I came with him there was less contempt than I had expected.

Salman Rushdie

#58. Traffic in the streets of Bombay is chaotic at best. Riding a bicycle is a dangerous occupation. However, there are hundreds of them on the streets competing with the cars and buses and lorries because it is the poor man's mode of transport.

Rohinton Mistry

#59. The fun of sitting around Pangong Lake with 40 guys around a fireplace, having a glass of wine ... staying in one camp together ... that's an experience. Waking up at 5 in the morning, watching the sun come up. You don't do these things in Bombay.

Gautam Singhania

#60. In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.

Salman Rushdie

#61. ...wearing a turban of yellow, signifying knowledge, and a robe of purple, portraying purity and activity, Virchand Gandhi of Bombay delivered a lecture on the religions of India....

The New York Times

#62. India's way is not Europe's. India is not Calcutta and Bombay. India lives in her seven hundred thousand villages.

Mahatma Gandhi

#63. I know now that it's the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love.

Gregory David Roberts

#64. I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.

Salman Rushdie

#65. What's interesting about Twitter is the unmediatedness of it, the directness of it. I'm on a train somewhere in New York and I send out a tweet. Somebody sitting at dinner in Bombay checks their phone and they see it.

Teju Cole

#66. Duly Enlightened Gandhi's head by Mall of the 'Free Press Journal,' Bombay, in 1932Watches may disagree, but let us not.

Mahatma Gandhi