I grew up speaking Korean, but my dad spoke English very well. I learned a lot of how to speak English by watching television.

'Sesame Street' early on and then 'Little House on the Prairie' was a big deal in our house. I always identified with 'Little House' because they were wanderers, and there was something about being an immigrant.

Even though there's a lot of horror from Asia in the American cinematic tradition, I hadn't seen Asians at the center of it.

The biggest boss has the clearest desk.

I've thought for years, sometimes against my will, about what kind of son I'm supposed to be, what's expected. Being Korean, that's a particularly charged question. Is your duty to your culture or to your parent? Is your life your own, or the second half of your parents' life? Who owns your life?

Whenever I'm on my way to a premiere or something, I always have a good laugh in the car... because it's all so absurd - I'm one generation removed from starvation.

What was exciting to me in talking to Kogonada was I was just very convinced that he was a very real and pure artist. He was so uninterested in the commercial game.

I feel like there's this need that the Asian-American community has to feel like people. It's something that Asians in Asia do not understand about us.

I like to flip flop, but making your days work to find a laugh is a really good way to spend a day. I appreciate it more going away and then coming back to it.

I've found it to be true that sometimes a stranger can give you advice that stays with you, utter truths the closest people in your life have trouble saying.

I've had an unusual career in that I've never had a big break, but the rent always seemed to get paid.

It'd be nice if Asian actors could be perceived as profitable, which is the bottom line. We're perceived as not mattering much fiscally.

I have an affinity for comedy because I like to watch them. It's an honor to make comedies because I love being able to pop something into the DVD player and laugh. I love doing it.

I've found that one's language abilities, especially for Korean kids like me, get frozen at the age you immigrated. So I've always associated Korea with being a child and being infantilized through my inability to speak.

I campaigned for Obama, and that was such a big component of getting the vote out, was social media.

I think my parents were surprisingly cool with me entering the arts. Although, I think they thought it was going to be a phase, and they didn't expect me to actually stick with it, and rightfully so. They were concerned whether I could afford groceries, being an actor.

The key to doing 'Harold and Kumar' movies is you make it earnest. Primarily what we do is make Harold and Kumar's relationship and friendship believable, and we don't actually work on being that funny.

I had a stereotype in my mind of what a 'Star Trek' fans is, but I couldn't have been more wrong.

I think obviously the 'Harold and Kumar' stuff is trying to lean head first into the raunch.

Good things will come from self-expression.

The scariest thing is to go into a new situation for myself, and yet I have a job where I do that every few months, meet a hundred new people, and then have to perform in a very highly pressurized environment.

I've been called a funny person for a long time. I don't know that I know anything about comedic acting.

I think about John Lennon all the time. What would John Lennon do? What would John Lennon say if he got this part? How would he act? I don't know, but he's my moral barometer.

The Asian-American kids I meet respond to a democracy in the vulgarity of my roles.

I have this nightmare that one day I will have to look at every picture I've ever taken with people in an airport or in bars or restaurants, and it will make me very sad.

I've never even seen a Cheech and Chong movie.

It's so funny that Hollywood has become so entrenched in its formulas. Because what I've experienced is that the good stuff comes from places you don't expect.

One of the things I like about comedy in general is that it affords Asian Americans the opportunity to not be noble.

I need my comedy to offend. That's my personal views.

I get called Harold the most. I think maybe 'Harold & Kumar' fans don't know my name, and 'Star Trek' fans do know my name... Harold fans are vocal!

Our species likes being social.

I write, and I sing, and I play a little guitar. I mean, it's tiny. Ba-dump-bum!

What's impressed me about 'Star Trek' fans is how many generations they span and how many nations they represent. They are all over the place.

I accept what people say. I don't have time to dissect it.

As long as the rent's getting paid, you don't think about getting out of the game.

That's what it is: a 'Harold & Kumar' movie is a romance between two best friends.

Movies may be as close to a document of our national culture as there is; they're supposed to represent what we believe ourselves to be. So when you don't see yourself at all - or see yourself erased - that hurts.

It just seemed hedonistic when I first started acting. It was a pleasurable thing. But as I look back on it now, I understand that it was a journey of the self for me.

I don't know what the next frontier is, but good comedy should put its toe into taboo waters. You have to transgress a little bit, and that area shifts with culture and with the year.

You know, I always root for the older athlete. I root for the second album. I root for solo careers after the rock star breaks the band apart.

That's a huge part of being a human being: looking for love and finding a partner in this world. When you constantly play characters who don't have that life, it feels incomplete and not totally human.

You're trying to grow up, and you don't want to be like your parents, and that gets mixed up with being Korean... They brought their values from Korea, and I accepted them because I didn't know anything more. But as I grow older, I feel more Korean every year; it's very strange.

When I saw 'My Fair Lady,' I was surprised at how mean and misogynistic Henry was. Maybe that's why it's dropping out of public consciousness.

The message of 'Star Trek,' if there is one, seems to be that we should try to live up to the very best that we're capable of.

When I first started acting in college, at Cal, the thing that I loved about acting was not being onstage but going into rehearsals. The thing, as I look back on it now, that I was most attracted to, was that I felt like I'd found my family. It was just a bunch of loonies.

I have a few go-to moves like jazz hands, shake the booty, stupid eyes. It was once a mating ritual, but now it's all about looking silly and making the kids smile.

Asians narratively in shows are insignificant. They're the cop or the waitress or whatever it is. You see them in the background.

Early on, I played a Chinese delivery person, and even that, which was very innocuous, felt like I was somehow betraying myself. I felt very self-conscious on set doing that role, with a crew that was almost entirely white.

Typically, actors overplay jargon or toss it away in an extravagant display of casualness. Real people hit the important parts hard.

'Star Trek' seems to be an appeal to our better nature, the side of ourselves that works toward peace and cooperation and understanding and knowledge and yearns to seek out knowledge rather than the side that wants to divide and control one another.