I love anything by Joan Didion. Incidentally, she was one of the local moms when I was growing up in Point Dume. She always reminded me a little bit of my mother, so I feel a great affinity. I love the precision of Didion's writing. There's a construction and a craftsmanship to her sentences that's imbued with so much emotion.

Somewhere in my callow, misspent youth, I was smart enough to marry my best friend.

If I had been on 'Ally McBeal,' I would have been seen coming out of the shower on the first show.

The challenge as a parent is letting your kids fail in the right ways because that's where we do most of our learning.

It used to be, on TV, you'd see only two types of Asians. You'd see the science geek who's using his mobile phone or something like that, or you'd see a very token Asian family - yuppie mother and father and two little Asian kids. It's the last barrier for Hollywood.

I am half Scottish. My father is an expat from Glasgow, and on my mother's side there's a bit of French, a bit of Scottish, a bit of Irish.

As Asian-Americans, the charge that is often lobbed against us is sort of the least original: the idea that somehow we're perpetual foreigners, that we can't be trusted, and that even my father, who was patriotic to the point that it was kind of a joke among his children, would be accused of being disloyal to America.

I play Captain Lance Van Der Berg, who's a Union captain who ends up staying with the Confederate family who's been taken over by the army when they come into the city in Virginia. He strikes up a romance with the youngest daughter in the house, which obviously causes some issues for the family.