People choose whatever projects they've seen that I've done over the years, and whichever one is their favorite is the only one they care about. But I realized that none of those were my voice or representative of what my thoughts and feelings were.
It's really cool to be around people that are younger than you who are really cool with being open about stuff.
As a kid, I always idolized entrepreneurs. I thought they were cool people in the way that I thought basketball players were cool people. It's cool that some people get paid to dunk basketballs, but I'm not one of those people.
When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.
I usually just have a circle of people that I associate myself with. I'm not really cool with a lot of people. It might seem like I'm cool with them, but I'm really not.
I have two brothers, and one of them plays the guitar. I actually started playing the guitar because of him. Both of my brothers are 12 years older than me, so I thought they were really cool, and I just wanted to be really cool like them.
In today's world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they're cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.
When I first started, in 2006, it was an exciting time. Independent, cool, weird artists were being successful, and magazines were writing about them, and people were getting played on radio that were, like, really good.
Growing up, my favorite movies were 'Forrest Gump,' 'Shawshank Redemption,' 'Gladiator' - none of them really had Asian leading men.
The 'Damsels' crew was low-budget, young people who were doing their first thing almost. A lot of it. It felt like Pied Piper or Rumpelstiltskin or whatever: it was me and people thirty years younger or more. But it was great; it was really fun.
I went to Northwestern because I had gone to a really nontraditional high school. I was like, 'It'd be cool to have a traditional college experience.' Then I was like, 'Oh, but none of these people understand what's cool about me. My specialness is not appreciated in this place.'
I had written children's books for 14 years before I published 'Wicked.' And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.
I had written childrens books for 14 years before I published Wicked. And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.
Book culture has also become something that's kind of incredible to younger people now, because of the Internet. If you go to any of the book fairs - PS1 or the MOCA Book Fair - none of the people are over the age of 40 years old there, and they trade and buy books, because they're almost antiquities at this point. They're not really important, in a way, because the Internet is how information is taken in.
Through the years I've learned to gain the trust of humans. I'm really good at gaining the trust of animals and I have developed the same ability with humans. I don't make people feel wrong, I just make people aware. I have learned to make people laugh.
The 'Being Human' people were really cool and let me improvise. They had such a good working atmosphere. It was a cool set-up and a really good environment to be in.