“I remain on SVU because it is an incredible opportunity.”

As an actor, I have casting issues. I’m a minority. I don’t have trouble making a living, but as far as being on the food chain of the pecking order of actors, I’m not at the top of it. With the jobs that I do, there are always control issues with directors and producers.

Asian people are very practical and come from a conservative world. The parents want their kids to be doctors and lawyers. There are casting calls for Asian children, but once the parents find out the children might miss school, they’re opposed to it.

Writing is an incredibly creatively empowering experience for me. It is the place where nobody tries to control what I’m doing.

I had studied the violin to a certain amount of success. At some point, I realized that I didnt really like the violin. I was only doing it because I could, and I was good at it, and everyone was encouraging me. But I didnt have a great love for it.

I’ve always had tremendous support from my parents. I think there’s a myth that gay people have lousy relationships with their parents.

If I were to limit myself to the opportunities that were presented playing only Chinese-American parts, I would be virtually without a career.

I’m a strong nonbeliever in the Christmas letter where you don’t really read it because it’s just full of kind of meaningless information. It doesn’t really resonate to the person reading it, but it means so much to the person that wrote it.

I have a hard time watching films and not thinking how I would play any part, whether its a man or a woman.

I call [ordinary people] real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure – stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little.

I’m barely prolific and incredibly lazy.

Mary J. Blige is the Queen Latifah character. Her voice in this movie [Rock of ages] is, she just gives it this incredible warmth, and she’s just this person who blows out of the screen. She’s just incredible.

That was another incredible thing: the opportunity to be in Greenland, a place I had read about in NatGeo a decade before.

The contrast was incredible.

Something that’s such a joy in my life every day – cooking – is this incredible, horrific danger to women around the world.

Billy Joel is an incredible musician. He just feels like one of the guys, you know. I grew up listening to his music.

My father wouldn’t get us a TV, he wouldn’t allow a TV in the house.