"The freedom of the 'everyday mind' consists rather in not kneeling down in awe. Its mental attitude is better expressed as "sitting unmoveable like an object."

"Haikus allow the whole world to appear within things."

"...Zen Buddhism, this religion of immanence."

"God is nothingness: He is 'beyond all speech.'"

"...I pray to God to make me free of God."

"At the deepest level, the desire for complete union with God exhibits a narcissistic structure."

"Zen Buddhism is inspired by a basic trust in the Here, a basic trust in the world."

"The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom."

"Enlightenment is an awakening to the everyday."

"Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen."

"Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself."

"The emptiness of Zen Buddhism... creates a neighborly nearness between things."

"To die is to wander."

"When we resist impermanence, the self intensifies."

"Emptiness is not a denial of the proper but an affirmation of it."

"If life can no longer be narrated, wisdom deteriorates, and its place is taken by problem-solving."

"Stories on digital platforms like Facebook or Instagram are not genuine stories. They have no narrative duration. Rather, they are just sequences of momentary impressions that do not tell us anything."

"The smartphone seems to be a playground, but it is a digital panopticon."

"Without narration, life is purely additive."

"The reason that people take selfies is not narcissism. Rather, it is inner emptiness. There is no meaning to stabilize the ego. Faced with its inner emptiness, the ego constantly produces itself."

"A screen bans reality."

"Psychological disorders are symptoms of a blocked story... The patient is cured the moment she narrates herself free."

"On a political level, I just found that I was more excited by what my skill-set could bring to film and television. Asian [American] theater has stretched the boundaries a little bit, but at the time, [it] was much more involved in what I thought was an older form of expression. It was much more about identity plays, explaining who we were as Asian Americans through dramas. And that didn't interest me as much. I was interested in people who weren't going to theater, and reaching them. That always excited me more, and to this day, theater, though on a formal level is the ideal place for an actor, on some political level, I find it frustrating that theatergoers are mostly rich -- maybe that's unfair -- mostly white…"

"I’ve spent my life trying to figure out what Asian-ness means…but you know, I really gotta figure out what whiteness means. We all have to figure out what it means, apparently, for our survival."

"I’ve always said that it really bothers me that so much of Asian representation in cinema has been people running away from their Asian-ness to find love elsewhere…"

"…If you start thinking about representation too much—and you think about what movie should exist for an Asian-American person, and for an Asian-American male, or what you would like to see an Asian-American male doing on TV or in movies, even though that’s a legitimate thing to think about—it clouds my ability to go, “Oh, that’s just a fun thing. I’d like to throw myself into that situation”..."

"…Short stories still require a similar amount of lead-up time (sometimes they spend several years in my head) but once I sit down to write I finish within a few days, and have never needed to redraft or heavily revise. I love short stories. They are perfect, crystallized moments. Snapshots of life…"

"…Knowing the end. Knowing the rest. I like unanswered questions, and I don’t really believe in endings…"

"…You might think it’s harder to come up with something from the ground up. And funnily enough, real-life settings seem to have their mystical way of kind of…working out. If you need an alley for something to happen and you’re thinking of a particular place, strangely enough, you usually find it. You usually find something workable that you can do. There’s a little less pressure, I will say, having made up something, versus trying to do justice to the place that actually exists."

"…I can’t get away from violence and gore. Every fantasy I write will be dark, and disturbing in places. That’s what I like in my fantasy."

"You know, the concept of even an Asian-American person and a man has morphed and changed even in the last decade by a lot. You know, there's moments where people were super psyched that an Asian man was in a relationship with a white woman. And that was, like, a big point of victory for a moment…"

"Let's not mess with your Americana that's kind of embedded into your body. The food that you've eaten, the choices that you've made, the way that you think - don't alter those things. Instead, just - let's work on the language so that you can be unequivocally Korean. But let's leave these mysterious Western encodings in your body alone. And I think that created its inherent kind of, like, dissonance with that character where you don't know who or what and where he's from."

"These days I feel my otherness in every situation…If I go to Korea, there are reminders that I’m not fully Korean. I can speak it – and I look it there – but there are cultural and historical things that I don’t have because I wasn’t necessarily raised there. They really form the identity of being Korean and I’m missing parts of those…a man with no country…That’s the kind of place I’m operating from."

"Here’s what an Asian person looks like to a majority white audience…But if you go to Korea, the characters are just humans because they’re not thinking about it like that. That’s something that I was made aware of [with Burning], which was really wonderful for me to know. I didn’t have to represent all Asians. I could just represent myself."

"It’s a perfect killing machine...A handgun [wound] is simply a stabbing with a bullet. It goes in like a nail...[With the high-velocity rounds of the AR-15 style rifle] it's as if you shot somebody with a Coke can."

"One looks like a grenade went off in there. The other looks like a bad knife cut."

"She has a 101 percent chance of surviving. She will not die. She does not have that permission from me."

"Development experts and theorists of democratization take note. South Korea has the same culture, historical legacies, and so on as its neighbor to the North. And yet it is an advanced industrial economy and a thriving democracy that has just, despite its Confucian culture, elected a woman as president. It has managed to reach this high point of prosperity and human dignity because of — to reduce a complex set of phenomena to its minimal essence — different institutions than those in the North: democratic and capitalist ones. (I realize that I may be violating some tenet of doctrinaire realism with this observation. For the less doctrinaire, the contrast between the two Koreas is a useful reminder of why we try and favor and even push for democratic capitalism). Given the stark contrast between the two countries one can safely draw at least one conclusion: There is nothing inherent in culture or history that ipso facto should keep a country poor and enslaved."