“When you audition for shows in Hollywood, you go in, you do your scene, maybe you get an adjustment. It’s sort of easy, and a lot of times it just feels sort of rote and simple.”

I think I’m the funniest guy in a room full of unfunny people.

Whereas when you go to New York and you audition for plays, you walk out sweaty and intimidated and nervous and doubting yourself as an actor.

If people understood what life insurance does, we wouldn’t need salesmen to sell it. People would come knocking on the door. But they don’t understand.

When you walk out, the money walks in

The biggest asset you have is your earning capacity, and that depends entirely on your attitude.

The biggest asset you have is your earning capacity, and that depends entirely on your attitude.

When you audition for shows in Hollywood, you go in, you do your scene, maybe you get an adjustment. It’s sort of easy, and a lot of times it just feels sort of rote and simple.

If you’re starting to lose your faith in the general intelligence of the American populous, there’s nothing like them mistaking pop culture for Van Gogh as a sign that people still read their history books and care about art.

I get up in the morning and I put on makeup and then I say somebody else’s words in someone else’s clothes, and then I go home and watch TV, have a glass of whisky and go to bed.

Your biggest asset is a positive attitude. That more than anything else determines your earnings.

If you look at the history of advertising, most of them were Jews, so it was only a matter of time before ‘Mad Men’ explored that area of advertising.

Fundamentals are right down to earth. And one fundamental is: You have to make calls. Nothing happens until you make a call. It’s that fundamental!

When you realize the writers start writing to who you are, you’re basically reading reviews of yourself. And then it becomes this cyclical nightmare where I feel like I need to play into it, then I find myself acting like the character in real life.

Read! Study never stops because publications never stop coming in. It’s read and study. And think about what you’re studying. Take it apart and put it together. Ask ‘why?’ And know the answers.

I don’t like horror, which is ridiculous because I’ve been in three horror movies, but when I see those things, I see camera tricks and fake blood and actors screaming and I don’t know understand why other actors don’t see that.

Most people buy not because they believe, but because the sales person believes.

You need fighters like me to battle, because frankly

I lived there [ in New York City] as an artist, but never as a Chinese artist.

Even though everybody who looked at me would call me a Chinese artist, that’s the 1980s. New York in the ’80s was not so interesting.

I grew up about 60 miles northwest of New York, in Middletown, NY.

In America, people think being South Asian is still kind of exotic. When you go outside New York and Chicago and L.A., there are people who have never tried Indian food… they’ve never even tasted it!

When you’re on the subway in New York, people literally could be 11-inches away from you, and you can’t just stare at them.

I often feel that my days in New York City, that I was here for five years, didn’t get one job, went on a thousands of auditions and literally did not get a job on a soap, not a movie, not TV, not nothing, although I did do some commercials thank God.

Ernest Hemingway was always uneasy in New York and liked being there less than in any other city he frequented.