“We hope we’re better. The reality is we had a pretty darn good team last year. But you can’t just throw your gloves out there and be good again. We want to take that next step as a team.”

Derek (Jeter) told me the ghosts would show up eventually!

I don’t know why we play better on the road. I really don’t. Chalk it up to coincidence, I guess. I don’t think we care where we play, which is a good thing. But you’d like to see our home record be a little better than it is.

I went to a college in New York called New Paltz. I studied theater there for four years.

For years, I refused to go to any openings, not even my own.

I was in the most restricted prison in China, the most tough. The design of the prison is modeled for internal crimes of the Communist party, so it’s like a mafia family’s law. It’s independent to the law this nation openly applies.

When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings.

Even if there have been setbacks during these past years, China is changing. China’s society is opening.

One of the things I’ve really gotten past in the last couple of years is the idea of being made uncomfortable by the way things appear, rather than how things are.

I was an illegal alien for many, many years. I couldn’t move. If I moved I could not even get a visa back.

The society was so different [in China] – it was a feudalistic society. It didn’t come to a point of industrial revolution until twenty years ago.