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

"How I was raised is what I am today."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Acting is actually private."

"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."

"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."

"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 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!"

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

"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."

"All teenagers have this desire to somehow run away."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."