Television Personalities

"Life is so much a daily exercise in learning to love yourself and forgive yourself, over and over."

"Being normal is being completely unique, because nobody's the same."

"Not everybody is meant to stay in your life till the end, you know, and everyone is there in certain points in your life to teach you different lessons or to show you something that you haven't seen before. And some really just come and go, and don't leave any impressions or footprints in your life as well. So, people come and go, and as of now, even though I don't have many friends, I have my family and I have a career that I thoroughly enjoy, so I'm very grateful for my life right now."

"My philosophy was very much to embrace yourself and love what you are, instead of making you something you're not. Refine what you already have - don't change it at its core. That's always been my whole ethos."

"Just because we mess up doesn't mean all the lessons we learned are undone. Healing can be imperfect."

"There are a million ways to reach recovery. Don't let anyone tell you you can't find a way that works for you."

"I definitely like myself more as I grow older, and there’s no way I would want to return to my younger days of people pleasing and uncertainty. But the journey doesn’t end here. I wish to be more courageous, to have the courage to live life more fully, stand up for what I believe in and fight for who I’ll eventually fall in love with."

"I’ve never felt weak. I’ve never felt not seen. I do feel seen and heard, but I also have a responsibility to make all sorts of layers of representation work—myself as a woman, an older woman, a Chinese woman, a Singaporean in Los Angeles, an Asian actress in Hollywood. Bring it on, because all of them are so Kheng. This is who I am. I’m not an older woman wanting to be a younger woman. I’m not a Chinese woman wanting to be any other race."

"The consistency of my body has changed and I quite like that. Everything has gone softer and gentler, and my ease with how I look is powerful—what I consider beautiful really helps me to grow old."

"More families should watch the Olympics together. To me, those are core American family values: Cheering on a corrupt institutional body that's super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it's an equal playing field and celebrate it - what's more American than that?"

"The reality is that LGBTQ+ people face challenges at disproportionally higher rates than their straight counterparts - drug use, sex work, and financial instability can be an unfortunate result. My privilege as a young cis white man whose parents weren't going to let me drown afforded me the ability to make those mistakes and live to talk about it."

"We are all human beings—the same human beings. Don’t categorize that you are yellow, you are white, you are Black, and white is better than yellow or Black or any other skin color. That’s stupid things to compare. We are all different and beautiful."

"My two sons are Korean Americans living in the states. My son living in LA, he is worrying about me coming to the states for the Oscars because you might get hurt on the street or something like that. Who knows? You’re an old woman. They’re aiming old woman. Can’t you have security guard or something? That’s terrible. He’s worrying about me just being old woman getting attacked."

"When I watch the movie, I don’t want to learn anything. I just enjoy it. So whatever they see, they can see [from] a different angle. Some people could understand the mother’s part, or the father’s part, or the grandma’s part—it’s a free country. You can feel whatever you feel like to do."

"When some project comes from America, people in Korea think I admire Hollywood, No, I don't admire Hollywood. The reason I keep coming is because if I come to the States and work, maybe I'm able to see my son one more time. That’s from the bottom of my heart."

"With age, what happens is you become freer, in a way, and more relaxed. You don’t have the weight of responsibility. I can actually step back and enjoy, and also be more forgiving. I’m very frank about myself and in all situations. It sometimes has been a help and sometimes been a distraction in this career. Usually, I tried never to have interviews when I was working in Korea because they would misunderstand or misinterpret me, so I was afraid to have public interviews. Here in the United States, I can do more interviews, but it is more an issue of language, of my English."

"The award doesn’t mean nothing to me. My reward is getting new jobs, new projects—that’s my reward. Of course, that moment when you receive the award, you’ll be very happy. You could be very happy in the moment. But I’m a very practical person and a very realistic person. If I get a new job, that’s my reward."

"I also told him [ Brad Pitt ] to come to Korea. He promised that he will. But I don’t really believe the words of Americans. Their vocabulary is so fancy. He said my performance was very respectable and whatnot, but I’m old. I don’t fall for those words."

"Usually, actors and actresses fall in love with theater or film, and study and learn so they can be successful, but that was not the case with me. I bumped into acting. I fell into it. So that’s why I tried to practice a lot, trying to prepare before performances, because I felt like I was not ready like they were. I had to do more. They had prepared their whole lives to be an actor. Me, I was just looking for a part-time job and I wound up being an actress. That’s why I started that habit, and I’m really grateful now that I’ve always done that. They say practice makes you perfect. That is something I really strongly believe in. As I went through my career, I found if I read lines over and over, I don’t even know how many times I’d read them, but the more I read and memorize, the more different ways I would find to play the role. That’s why I do it over and over. Some people think it’s stupid, but no. To me, it’s the best way to learn a character."

"I’m really enjoying quarantine, because I can rest. I don't have to see anybody. I can just stay home 24 hours a day and stay in bed, my favorite place."

"The absolute love and sacrifice of our grandmother and parents are a universal story."

"If somebody did something bad to me or was rude to me, I will never forget. But if somebody's nice to me, I will also never forget. This means people think I'm a very dangerous woman who never forgets."

"Second-generation Asian Americans think they are Americans but in the eyes of Americans, they don’t look American. There must be a dilemma like that."

"I practice a lot for a role to memorize the lines thoroughly. Some people think the line is not important, but to me it's very important. That line for that role is the character’s thinking and her attitude and her everything. So if I memorize it thoroughly, I can just play it this way or that way freely. That's my mission. On set I always have my script. And my cigarette."

"Sorry to tell you, because I’m usually working in the Korean industry, not knowing this kind of award. I didn’t even expect having awards from America. I’m living on the other side of the world so to me, first, what’s happening to me? I don’t know. But when we made this film, we didn’t expect this warm welcoming. We just made it together, just like family. So I’ve been numb."

"It's so important to work with material you can really mold and milk and create and evolve."

"If you feel good about what you put on your face - or body - that's really putting your best foot forward."

"I view my career like a rubber-band ball in that every role is a new experience building toward something bigger."

"I didn't want to be known as the reality-show star trying to be an actress, so I kept a lot of the failed auditions to myself."

"I think the whole movement of #MeToo is not just calling out the sexual harassers, which is really important, but also crying out that we want equal pay, equal representation, equal opportunities, and that we want to see more female directors and photographers."

"My parents, in their 40s, moved to a different country, started a business, bought a house, didn't speak the language, raised two kids - it's kind of amazing."

"We want to see women in more power positions, not just in front of the screen but behind the screen as well."

"We'd only speak Korean at home. They [parents] wouldn't let us have sleepovers and sent us away to Korean church camp during the summers. We had weird food concoctions, too, so instead of spaghetti bolognese, we had rice bolognese with kimchi."

"The narrative needs to change. Asian-American actresses don't want to be the damsels in distress anymore. We don't want to be saved, especially by a white man."

"There are these creative shows, all on cable, that are just so daring and out there. That's the stuff I really want to be a part of, like with 'Sucker Punch' and 'Hangover 2'. Those movies didn't hold back. They really went for it."

"Never cease to be amazed that you exist."

"I don’t know, maybe it’s a family trait, when I get in front of the camera, I just kind of go for it and it works out."

"Clean and dirty aren't opposites. They're two sides of the same coin, just like innovation and imitation, like risk and responsibility, like peripeteia and anagnorisis."

"Politics by nature requires you to ask the question you just asked in a very broad, macro way. Right? We have to consider policies that are essentially cookie-cutter because in the political world your ideas need to impact the largest number of people possible. That’s macro-works. My foundation is called Mike Rowe Works. Yes, my name is in it but it’s supposed to be MICRO. I’m looking for one person at a time. I can’t gauge the worth ethic of a cohort or a group or a race or a star sign. I need to meet the individual and if we want to reward the qualities that are sorely lacking you can’t take a cookie-cutter approach. That’s sort of a way of saying I’m not in politics because I’m not interested in policies that have these giant effects on large numbers of people. It’s not that I’m opposed to them, but it’s just that the only way to get elected is to go out there and talk in platitudes and tropes and generalities and bromides. That’s what people are sick of hearing."

"I think right now the biggest challenge of what the U.S. is facing in terms of standing up to China is the corporate sector"

"You’ve got corporations that see 1.2 billion people in China and those are many potential consumers for them. China is aware of that market potential. You’re dealing with a communist country and it’s foreign to our approach to governance and business. But our companies made a deal: get access to the sheer volume of people there in exchange for playing by the CCPs rules, whatever those might be. That is a very dangerous position to be in, particularly as the U.S. government is now recognizing them as the single biggest threat the country faces."

"I said to myself ‘I'm going to own this job. I'm going to make sure that I know this better than all of these guys and they're not gonna be able to push me around"

"We have what you call a three fold marriage. You make a triangle with your hands and you can see Jesus is at the top and we're below. That's pretty solid. You're a threefold covenant. There's three people in this marriage. We've been through some difficult things physically but we're still here, stronger than ever and living for the Lord."

"If you can laugh every day, you can get healthy. You get those endorphins going in the body, God’s been looking out for me. I enjoy every day."

"I had no formal training as an actor so I had to feel my way into it. I didn’t make any intellectual choices when playing Olivia, what I liked the most was being able to feel my way into it and not having any preconceptions of how to play the role. I just used my actual feelings to create the character and her relationships."

"What you want in an interview is four things: You want someone who can explain what they do very well, who can have a sense of humor and hopefully is self-deprecating, who has a bit of a chip on their shoulder, and passion. If you have passion, a chip on the shoulder, a sense of humor, and you can explain what you do very well, it doesn't matter if you're a plumber or a singer or a politician. If you have those four things, you are interesting."

"I'll tell you the truth, I've had bad days and good days in my life, but I've never had a day when I didn't enjoy that red light going on. Whether on the radio, or on television, there's still a little bump every time it goes on. And if you can spend a life, if you can get paid well for doing something you absolutely love, well you can't beat that."

"You cannot talk to people successfully if they think you are not interested in what they have to say or you have no respect for them."

"To really grasp the depths of diabolical evil, you have to be prepared to engage in some honest self-reflection. You have to be able to humble yourself and search the inmost core of your being in order to discover your own capacity for evil. Everyone has a capacity for evil. And everyone—at some point in their lives—has made use of that capacity and acted in evil ways. In order to understand the kind of evil that characterizes the inhabitants of Hell, you must attempt to understand evil itself. And the only way to do that is to dig and probe deeply inside your own soul, despite any unpleasant things you might find."

"The less I know, the better I feel about a person or book."