When you're "East Coast" person, you are so insufferable, and you have no idea. And I was. One, because I was miserable, and nobody liked to be around a miserable person, and two, everything that I thought was so profound, everyone had already dealt with.

I had these kind of unrealistic expectations that were fueled by romantic comedies, and it has both helped me and hurt me in many ways. It helped me because, in general, they've made me hopeful. I just figure things will eventually work out for me. But nobody is like any Tom Hanks character. Nobody is Hugh Grant. No one is Meg Ryan!

I was kind of unfriendly and suspicious of everyone around me. I didn't talk until I was about 15. It's a kind of famous story at my house.

Your fear that your parents will actually kill you for dropping out of college is something that I think a lot of children of immigrants would maybe relate to.

I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world.

My whole childhood was like: Work hard, be quiet, respect elderly people, respect your parents, and just be unobtrusive.

When I was a kid, my parents smartly raised us to keep quiet, be respectful to older people, and generally not question adults all that much. I think that's because they were assuming that 99 percent of the time, we'd be interacting with worthy, smart adults... They didn't ever tell me 'Sometimes you will meet idiots who are technically adults and authority figures. You don't have to do what they say.