A Quote by Justin Lin

There was something so pure about 'Better Luck Tomorrow' because money wasn't the currency. It was passion. The fact we were trying to do something even though no one was asking us to. It meant a lot.
I've always used masks. I think it's a lot about the fact that masks often reveal a sort of subconscious element to a character. The mask is carved and given an expression or markings to reveal something, even though it's shielding the face. Even though it's hiding the face, it seems to reveal something underneath.
Growing up, I learned that if you are passionate about something, that you can move mountains. Passion is more precious than gold, and it's a currency that everyone craves. It's something that's hard to fake, and when it's real, everyone wants to be on that train. It's about giving people something that they can believe.
Something passes between us that I'm pretty sure both of us can feel, even though neither one of us says anything. It's not even any kind of attraction, even though I've been feeling that on and off all night. This is something different.We have a secret now. A secret from Ava.
I did it [photojournalism] as something that was really rewarding to do, given the opportunity to express myself about something I cared about, and also to learn a lot by watching filmmakers I admired. In a sense, it was my film school. After doing it for a few years, I decided that the time had come to get it together and do some work of my own. So I stopped doing that and wrote some screenplays on speculation, because even though I wanted to direct, to direct you need a lot of money.
It meant a kind of real liberation of expression. It embraced amateurism in a way that I still am inspired by. It was not about trying to get, you know, stadium gigs or even commercial radio play or even record deals for that matter. It was about saying something 'cause you meant it, and expressing something that you felt. And that was primary for that - whatever the scene, whatever punk rock means, it was very, very important to me, very formative.
I spent a lot of time, a lot of energy trying to be a better artist and I still [do]. I spend a lot of time focusing on my craft. If you're going to take your passion into something beyond just something for fun on the side, you got to spend a lot of time on it to be great, and then you've got to make smart decisions about who you collaborate with [and] where you live [to] put yourself in the right situations to meet the right people to catch those breaks.
Passion is the engagement of our soul with something beyond us, something that helps us put up with or fight against insurmountable odds, even at high risks, because it is all worth it.
Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes, so that it's really left open for a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression of something I had at the time. I can't say a song is about this or that; in fact, I wouldn't even want to. I just prefer to have people live it anyway they want. Because it's theirs after that. There's nothing I can do about it anymore
I just thought to my self, all of a sudden, that we had something in common. A natural chemistry, if you will. And I had a feeling that something big was going to happen. To both of us. That we were, in fact, meant to be together.
There is something very unstabilizing about not knowing where you're coming from or where you're going. There's something very romantic about it, because you have this search for the unknown. But at the same time, some­times I'm like, "God, if I were to die tomorrow, where would I like to be buried?" I wouldn't know. That's kind of a heavy thought, but it's a fact. You don't know any­more where you belong.
It was difficult for me to understand that, when you're kind to someone in a big city, a lot of the time, they think that you want something. I didn't understand that, all of a sudden, niceness meant that you were trying to get something out of somebody.
We are apt to think that everything that happens to us is to be turned into useful teaching; it is to be turned into something better than teaching, into character. We shall find that the spheres God brings us into are not meant to teach us something but to make us something.
Walter Benjamin talks about art losing its original "aura" in an age of mechanical reproduction. In writing memoir, we're taking something that happened in a particular moment and meant something at that time, and we're trying to capture it to mass reproduce it for readers. So of course something is lost. And when we edit that material, we're getting even further from that aura, but toward something else that is potentially vital.
It was palpable, all that wanting: Mother wanting something more, Dad wanting something more, everyone wanting something more. This wasn't going to do for us fifties girls; we were going to have to change the equation even if it meant . . . abstaining from motherhood, because clearly that was where Mother got caught.
Rich kids gave us their old clothes. They were the best clothes we ever had. We were these very pure, naive, poor children. The rich kids called us a lot of names but it never bothered us because we didn't know what the words meant.
So much has changed about the culture, it's so much more about money and celebrity. Celebrity not in the sense of people who achieve something, because in the old days, I think if you were famous it meant you were an achiever. Now it's the Kardashians.
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