But I think there's a genuine joy, too, a sense that no matter what, even if my stomach's growling, I'm going to dance. That's what I want to leave people with at the end of the play. After all this, people still know how to live.

[On The Philippines:] ... eighty dialects and languages are spoken; we are a fragmented nation of loyal believers, divided by blood feuds and controlled by the Church.

We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child.

Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film.

I don't believe in sampling some Tibetan music just to make it sound groovy, but you do your homework, you understand what you're doing with it.

It's not just NYU. There are days when I feel like I'm stranded in some upscale mall in Pasadena. Don't even get me started on the insidious transformation of Bleecker Street!

I don't know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up.