I try to take roles that don't fall within the parameters of any Asian stereotype.

I never saw 'Home Alone.'

With acting, you are a small part of the creative process, and sometimes it is hard to feel like you are making an impact.

I don't like when an Asian-American actor says, 'I'm entering this business to change Hollywood.' It feels like the wrong reason - I would prefer they entered the business for artistic reasons, because they need to do it.

I am a little curmudgeonly about new media.

I would love to do Shakespeare, either onstage or on film.

'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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.