One of the ways [racism] pops up is when they turn a comic into a live-action movie and there's this temptation to make Asian characters white.

To find your true identity within the will of Tze Yo Tzuh...that is the highest of all freedoms.

It's easy to become anything you wish . . . so long as you're willing to forfeit your soul.

Building a habit of reading leads to all sorts of reading.

If you look at our world, we're becoming so much more diverse in every sense of the word. It's not just about culture or identity. It's also about the different ways we communicate.

In the '40s and '50s, a lot of teachers and librarians saw the graphic novel as the enemy of reading.

What is China but a people and their stories?

I think reading has got so many more enemies now that graphic novels have kind of flipped over to that side.

I think a lot of us go through a period where we feel like outsiders, and deal with that by wishing we were insiders. So that was the emotional core of American Born Chinese.

Sometimes, a fight you cannot win is still worth fighting.

I think a lot of us who are in books now were nervous children.

Nature attunes children to receive the coded messages that parents issue how to live a joyful and virtuous life.

I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion.

Centuries of perfectly-pitched heartbreak resound through Les' microphone as Stella and I embrace in a slow dance.

This long disease, my life.

for the poor the whole world is a self-constituted critic; your smallest action is open to debate. No secret place of your soul is safe from invasion.

Family is the only real wealth.

If people are really narcissistic or have a need to be seen as more than they really are, or to be admired as having it all together, then they cannot be followed and trusted by others.

If wine is fruit, then vodka must be a vegetable.

There are no failures, only outcomes. As long as I learn something, I am succeeding.

Hope is not a feeling. It is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what you are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out.