Gene Luen Yang Quotes
Writing for myself and writing for another artist are two very different experiences. When I handle both the story and the art, I have full control. I can endlessly tweak every word and every line.
Quotes to Explore
-
There ought to be more grants that go to people in their late twenties and early thirties. That's a crucial age, although it's very hard to judge who is worth supporting and who is not. Looking back on my own life, I see that was the period when I was closest to giving up as a novelist and when I most needed some encouragement.
-
People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time.
-
I'm the complete opposite of every clean cut, decent-looking guy you could ever think of. Yet, I have the biggest heart in the world.
-
When I'm working in America, I wake up with an American accent and stay with it all day till makeup comes off. I just want everyone to be at ease, and not have the show's creators think, 'Oh my god, he's so English, why did we hire him?'
-
Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.
-
I had a sense of what leadership meant and what it could do for you. So am I surprised that I am sitting up here on the 62nd floor of Rockefeller Plaza? No.
-
I find the whole situation of confronting an audience terrifying.
-
From a spectator point of view, Test cricket is not important; people hardly watch Test cricket. But as a player, Tests are the real thing. You have to concentrate for five days. It's a lot of time, and not easy to do it day in and day out. If people have played 70-100 Tests, it's a lot of cricket, a lot of concentration and dedication.
-
I was a huge fan of comedy and movies and TV growing up, and I was able to memorize and mimic a lot of things, not realizing that that meant I probably wanted to be an actor. I just really, really amused myself and my friends with memorizing entire George Carlin or Steve Martin albums.
-
When I saw Wonder Woman being constantly put in positions where she'd get tied up with her own rope, or held hostage, even as a kid, my reaction was 'C'mon, she's too smart for that.'
-
You shouldn't be ashamed of your pain. You have the right to have your pain treated.
-
If you learn from defeat, you haven't really lost.
-
There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it.
-
Hollywood is something imagined... acting is something crafted.
-
Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.
-
In 1989, I was on Tiananmen Square with the students, living in their makeshift tents and joining their jubilant singing of the Internationale. In the two decades since, each time that I have gone back, visions from those days seem to return with increasing persistence.
-
When you are already in Detroit, you don't have to take a bus to get there.
-
I adore anything Michael Alexis writes.
-
When I was three, I wanted to be four. When I was four, I wanted to be prime minister.
-
I do a lot of speaking engagements and sometimes I feel like I’m being paid to curse in front of people who haven’t heard it in a while.
-
The thing is, if I try to talk about acting, I come off as moaning. But I'm privileged. I think it's all about control. Acting is vulnerable because you're not in control of anything. You have to give up a lot of your trust; it's up to somebody else what they do with what you've given them.
-
Can we call the essay its own genre if it's so promiscuously versatile? Can we call any genre a 'genre' if, when we read it from different angles and under different shades of light, the differences between it and something else start becoming indistinguishable?
-
Wear perfume wherever you want to be kissed!
-
Writing for myself and writing for another artist are two very different experiences. When I handle both the story and the art, I have full control. I can endlessly tweak every word and every line.
