The very fine line between loneliness and solitude, reflection; being alone, always appealed to me when I was a kid.

I've always just tried to be who I am and be honest in terms of what I play. If that reaches a larger group of people, great. If it doesn't - if it remains obscure - that's okay as well.

Romanticism implies nostalgia for damaged goods.

The music itself, I suppose, is the thing that will survive in my memory, happily.

There's a pianist out of Boston who made a beautiful record for the Fresh Sound label called "Sketch Book"; his name is Vardan Ovsepian.

I guess chemistry always changes when you play with someone else.

I'm not much of a storyteller with words!

I'm happy to have the opportunity to record the records I want to - I'm very aware that that's a privilege.

By constantly moving the flashlight of your attention to the perimeter of your understanding, you enlarge your sense of the world.

Like hunger or thirst, the instinct for balance is built into the human body.

I paint from the top down. From the sky, then the mountains, then the hills, then the houses, then the cattle, and then the people.

Asian American men, Asian men have been basically eunuchs in American cinema and television.

To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.

Pride is a wound and vanity is the scab on it. One's life picks at the scab to open that wound again and again. Among men it seldom heals and often grows septic.

It's only a world, after all, and they're just sand grains in the desert, worlds.

In arguing one should meet serious pleading with humor, and humor with serious pleading.

I was an ugly kid; when I was born, after the doctor cut the cord, he hung himself.

I was always in love with Judy Garland, and when I was growing up, I fell in love with Leonardo DiCaprio, of course.