Naveen Andrews

Naveen: In Hollywood, it's normal to have white men with black women, but the reverse is too threatening.

Naveen: I've always liked women who are older. They seem to know who they are, and they've lived. They've got soul, and that's very attractive.

Naveen: (About "Lost") I think we're sort of pushing the envelope in that way. You won't see this kind of cast anywhere else. It's highly unusual, and if people can learn from that, that would be good.

Naveen: My dad was violent. Things were getting really bad and if I'd stayed, I might not be here now.

Naveen: (on "Lost")We're dealing with an immense kind of pressure to keep the quality up. It's make or break this season, quite frankly. ... We have an audience now. We can't let them down.

Naveen: Up to now, things have been relatively decent, if you ignore the episode where Sawyer was tortured. But now things are going to get wild and a lot more violent for everybody. Life will become rather brutal.

Naveen: I feel a sense of responsibility to the Iraqi community and to the Arab world.

Naveen: I already had a fraught relationship with my parents, who were very traditional. They wanted me to get a proper job, like any right-thinking parents would.

Naveen: Only when I came to America did I think of myself as British.

Naveen: (On His addiction while shooting Kama Sutra in India) It was my Rolling Stones 1972 tour. I was on everything. In India, the heroin is pure.

Naveen: If there's one thing I've learned, it's that the show's completely unpredictable. It's constantly changing. But I sense something sort of spiritual about the character, that somehow there's something in him that's trying to atone for what he's done in the past.

Naveen: Lost is by far the most challenging show I have had to work on.

Naveen: I'm no longer in rehab, I'm fixed, I'm a new person.

Naveen: The highest compliment I've ever received is when people have come up to me and said, I don't watch TV, but I watch your show. That's the best anyone could hope for.

Naveen: I would have liked to have traded places with Jimi Hendrix for a day just to have that kind of mind in terms of playing. There were things that Hendrix did that I think would be impossible for anybody else to get. They were things that will never happen again.

Naveen: I've always been attracted to older women, because they know who they are, they look infinitely better to me.

Naveen: I was always in trouble from an early age. I had a fraught relationship with my parents, who were very traditional. Doing plays at school was a joyous release.

Naveen: I think that reality TV is so bad. It is a tool by the media to not make people think.

Naveen: Just because I never went to university doesn't mean you can't read, although I do feel a bit uneducated from time to time.

Naveen: I hate watching myself on screen. It physically makes me sick, but tonight I have no choice and will have to bear it.

Naveen: I don't know if I have really made it as an actor. I don't even look at it that way.

Naveen: It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.

Naveen: (on the potential short life-span of characters on "Lost")
I think we all had that as a concern. That monster there is like a producer's dream, isn't it? Any one of us could get bumped off at any time and we're all aware of it. It keeps you on your toes.

Naveen: The older I get, the more I'm prepared to do things for the money.