My fairy-tale life ended the moment I wanted to apply for a passport.

I never went on an audition - when they were really looking at everybody.

For the past few years, I was the more visible Asian performer, and I think it gave young girls a kind of role model showing it's possible to actually reach success doing movies.

There are a lot of stereotypes to be broken which I think a lot of us are doing. What I do is, as soon as people try to pin me down to one kind of part, I'll play a very different kind of role, so it explodes that stereotype.

Acting is actually private.

When you feel so strongly about something and other people feel equally strongly, you have to feel stronger about it in order to succeed.

Acting for me is not a bad habit like smoking that I must make an effort to quit. I love acting; I love directing.

I know what actors fear, what they like; I know how to get things out of them and I listen to them better, since I've been there.

There is no theoretical study of motherhood. You know, before I became a mother, I did play a mother, but I was like - I was more thinking of my own mother. I was doing my mother.

I will always have a career. I believe in working. I don't believe that taking care of your house and children is enough for a woman. You don't feel complete.

I would never offer advice without the person asking for it. I, in general, don't believe in giving advice, actually, as a human being I don't.

If you know how to do a job very well, you keep doing it.

As an actress I find the most enjoyable part of acting is really just to please the director. I just want to please my director.

The lowest budget U.S. films are ten times times better than shooting in Tibet.

There are many ways you can make money. Certain ways will make you happy, certain other ways will make other people happy. But if you go in because there's money in there, you're bound to fail, bound to fail!

My fairy-tale life ended the moment I wanted to apply for a passport.

Physical hunger and physical poverty is something I could only imagine. I've been poor when I was in China... As kids we never had to starve, but just didn't have enough meat, enough rice.

I don't find intimate scenes more difficult than other scenes.

All teenagers have this desire to somehow run away.

I don't want to tell people what I make. It's a lot more than I ever dreamed of as a kid. I never think about it.

How do you explain certain physical qualities that somehow sell on screen? You're born with it... Certain people are just more watchable, and I was more watchable, but I don't think I understood acting or drama very well when I was a kid.

How I was raised is what I am today.

The difference between me and American-born actors is that I came here with the expectation of not being treated fairly.

All Asian parents are into your children having a respectable, decent stable job. Acting was unimaginable to my parents.

Beauty is the result of having been through an experience all the way through to the end - therefore it has a poignancy. Beauty that is singular always comes from following an experience to the point where you can go no further.

The romantic love we feel toward the opposite sex is probably one extra help from God to bring you together, but that's it. All the rest of it, the true love, is the test.

When you feel so strongly about something and other people feel equally strongly you have to feel stronger about it in order to succeed.

Roosevelt's magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

If it came to saving the life of one priest or sacrificing the life of an entire congregation, the church would save the life of the priest. Which is backwards, of course.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

All literary men are Red Sox fans - to be a Yankee fan in a literate society is to endanger your life.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

You have choices to make about what you do with the rest of your life.

From the standpoint of observation, then, we must regard it as a highly probable hypothesis that the beginnings of the mental life date from as far back as the beginnings of life at large.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

Any judge who allows an adulterer with a live-in girlfriend to terminate the life of his wife should be impeached.

I can assure you, public service is a stimulating, proud and lively enterprise. It is not just a way of life, it is a way to live fully.

The work which is manipulated looks a little boring to me. I think life is pretty strange anyway. It is wooo, wooo, wooo!

With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

Sometimes life's so much cooler when you just don't know any better and all the painful lessons have not hammered your head open yet.

My life is so full of surprises, nothing surprises me any more.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.

Yes, I am Algerian of Moroccan origin through my parents, but all my life is Algeria. I was born there.

At one point in your life, you'll have the thing you want or the reasons why you don't.