Chang-Rae Lee Quotes
No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.
Quotes to Explore
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I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.
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Like most ghetto kids I knew it was important to be 'somebody' so I became a good soccer player, because excelling at a sport seemed to make you special.
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My whole life has been a huge mistake, but what a divine mistake - doing something that I adore.
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I think Hollywood wants to be safe. The things you do first become your calling card, and I think people just sort of go, 'Well, we know he can do that.' They kind of put you in that hole.
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No, but there are people I grew up with from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains that would give any person on 'Justified' a run for their money in the scary department.
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For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.
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When I was young, we were taught not to dunk. We were taught not to stand out from the rest of the team. It's different now.
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I never publicise in advance what I'm going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish.
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I started to wear the sunglasses all the time at school, hiding behind them... I'd walk down the hallways, practically hugging the wall, dragging my head against it like I was crazy.
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Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.
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In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.
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I can honestly say that I've done everything I've wanted to do, always. Not without difficulty. But every time I wanted to do something, I just did it, from the age of 18 when I started my own theater with my friends. When I decided I wanted to act. I just bit the bullet.
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Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.
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I don't feel particularly comfortable about actors using whatever power they may have to push their beliefs, unless they're extremely well informed.
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Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.
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Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.
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Man, we were so opposite. One guy sang high, the other low. One guy tall, one short. We were like a quartet without the two guys in the middle. If you were putting two guys together to make hit records, you wouldn't have picked Bobby and me.
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I love all Helmut Lang. I love Alexander Wang and Alice+Olivia. And there's this brand called Hengst that makes a killer jumpsuit. I'm a sucker for those.
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Traveling, I've met Ghanaian people who have seen me in minor stuff, but they see the name Ato Essandoh, and they recognize it as a Ghanaian name. They come up to me and are always so excited. You don't think about it, but they really absorb American culture.
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Colombian culture has a lot of music - it's in our blood; it's in our DNA.
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I think that without sushi there would be no David Hasselhoff, because sushi is like the perfect way of describing the insides of David Hasselhoff. He is like a protein, clean and easy. That's how I feel about myself.
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What I'm dealing with is so vast and great that it can't be called the truth. It's above the truth.
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We never will get a full situation of open transparency, but we should seek to bring forth the major concerns about injustice and suffering and dishonesty. This needs to come into the open or there will never be peace in the hearts of us violated.
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No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.
