Teenage years are all about crushes: crushes so deep you wanted to inhabit the other person, be inside their skin, see the world through their eyes.

I do end up revealing a lot online, but in books, what I reveal is more tailored. Authors can couch revelations in fiction. With social media, no one wants to watch or read if it doesn't feel authentic, so you end up giving away a lot of yourself.

With Asian-Americans actors, specifically, there's been fewer opportunities for them in TV and film and fewer that have the ability to actually make a career out of it. It becomes a bit of a chicken and egg situation, where they're like, 'Oh, but they're not famous names,' but they haven't had a chance to be in anything yet, either.

Beyonce, Otis Redding, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, and Adele are a few of my favorites.

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

No one likes to work for free. To copy an artist's work and download it free is stealing. It's hard work writing and recording music, and it's morally wrong to steal it.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

I consider myself a writer who writes about American expatriates. And if I have any overt cause as a writer besides writing the best prose I can, it's to try to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world.