I had started off, before I ever got an acting job, working at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Productions as a reader. I was always interested in that side of the camera.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

We all struggle with our failure to communicate and our failure to reach beyond fear to love people.

I try to become more humble and more myself with every year. There was a while when I got famous where I was so confused and my head was spinning.

I assume that if people get to know me, they'll like me. If they don't, it's not my problem.

My major in college was Chinese Studies. It was very intentional.

I hope that doing truthful portrayals of people in a variety of circumstances gives people a kind of subterranean link to those characters.

I could have seen myself going into academia, but I don't love it; I just like it.

I want my life to effect the balance to the positive.

The Oscars have become such a big deal these days that it's just used as adjective.

When I was 5, my mother threw a party, and a friend and I wrote and performed a play called The Dutch Doll.

I am completely unflustered by whichever medium people choose to read my words. I'm just delighted they're reading them at all!

There's plenty of food, other than non-vegetarian, here, on this earth. So, don't hurt, kill and eat animals to increase your girth

The main business of religions is to purify, control, and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire in times of equality.

The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.

Break the rules. Be a fighter. Any dream is possible if you are brave enough to do it YOUR way.

You cannot bore people into buying your product - you can only interest them in buying it.

Expecting perfection from ourselves or others is not what holiness is about.

I don't think I could ever give up music. It's what makes me tick. If there was no music, there would be no writing.

I have a job to do, I have a wife and child to take care of. So I don't pay attention to things that I don't know anything about. I've got my own situation to deal with.

What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.