I go to Prague every year if I can, value my relationships there like gold, and feel myself in a sense Czech, with all their hopes and needs. They are a people I not only love, but admire.
To have faith in Divine protection is good, but even beter if backed by the pratical assistance heaven has a right to expect from sensible mortals.
There is in the end no remedy but truth. It is the one course that cannot be evil.
Truth can be costly, but in the end it never falls short of value for the price paid.
It takes a lot to wound a man without illusions.
Truth, like the burgeoning of a bulb under the soil, however deeply sown, will make its way to the light.
Death, after all, is the common expectation from birth. Neither heroes nor cowards can escape it.
Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment.
My work has always been controversial within certain segments of the Asian-American community. This is a community that is generally not represented well at all on the stage, in the media, etc. So on those few occasions when something comes along, everybody feels obligated to make sure that it represents his own point of view.
My father has always been interested in discarding the past. He's never much liked China or the whole idea behind China or Chinese ways of thinking. He's always been much more attracted to American ways of thinking. He feels Americans are more open - they tell you what they think - and he's very much that way himself.
I knew I was Chinese, but growing up, it never occurred to me that that had any particular implication or that it should differentiate me in any way. I thought it was a minor detail, like having red hair.
I am almost famous in China, because I have that Broadway cachet.
There is something very unique in American iconography about this notion of the pursuit of happiness.
We all deal with failure. If you're lucky to have a long career, it's part of the experience.
For a long time, it was hard for me to get my work done in Chicago. Silk Road gave me opportunities to do shows like 'Golden Child' - shows that nobody else seemed interested in. And they bring an artistic integrity to the work that matches anything you'll find at a bigger theatre.
There was all this talk when Obama got elected about how we were living in a postracial world. But we're not. Until we get to the point where James Earl Jones can play, say, George Washington, race matters. You wouldn't put a white actor in blackface to play Othello. You shouldn't have a white actor in what amounts to yellowface to play Asian.
I visited a new cultural center in Shanghai in 2005 that was pretty much perfect, except for the really badly translated Chinglish signs: a handicapped restroom that said 'Deformed Man's Toilet,' that kind of thing.
