Joan Chen Quotes (68 Quotes)

I don't want to tell people what I make. It's a lot more than I ever dreamed of as a kid. I never think about it.

I was frustrated. I was doing some bad movies, movies that I knew going in were not going to be great.

I read a lot. On location that's all I do. I've been reading very many different books. I used to follow writers, and whatever book they wrote, I would go buy right away.

When I stayed with a bunch of herding girls-young intellectuals sent down to herd military horses-they taught me how to take warm baths.

Only when you poeticize something does it become universal. I believe when your experience is more crystallized through distance and time, you're more able to poeticize something.

Black people are doing a lot better lately. They're getting a lot more better roles and they have fought for a long time.

When you feel so strongly about something and other people feel equally strongly, you have to feel stronger about it in order to succeed.

There is no theoretical study of motherhood. You know, before I became a mother, I did play a mother, but I was like - I was more thinking of my own mother. I was doing my mother.

I've received e-mails telling me about the protests ... friends who have gone back to work for American firms ... they are very, very worried and a little scared, ... I am a little scared. Every time tension like that builds up, I feel like I am not trusted by the Americans. I'm not trusted by the Chinese. I'm not trusted by anybody.

I was always so anxious to do the right thing, politically righteous, socially acceptable. It wouldn't have been good. It wouldn't have suited my personality because there is so much complication I didn't understand as a kid.

Beauty is the result of having been through an experience all the way through to the end - therefore it has a poignancy. Beauty that is singular always comes from following an experience to the point where you can go no further.

Physical hunger and physical poverty is something I could only imagine. I've been poor when I was in China... As kids we never had to starve, but just didn't have enough meat, enough rice.

Relatively speaking, I was a lot more naive than kids today.

All my girlfriends were learning musical instruments - forced to learn musical instruments because if they knew a musical instrument, they would be in the performance troupe. Even if they were sent down. Then they wouldn't be in the fields. Then they'd probably be treated a little better. That was the hope.

I think what's the most important thing for any mother is whether or not my children are going to be happy. My interpretation of that really is your fierce and savage love for your children. All motherly love is really without reason and logic. It's totally savage and that's an act out of love.

Having been an actress was also good because I know how to talk to the actors. I know what comes through and what doesn't and often times I've worked with a director whose directions I knew I'd just better not try to listen to because it messes you up. So, having had an acting background really helped.

Acting is actually private.

The acting in China is very stylized and dramatic, and I was just me.

We were so up high that we were really close to heaven, and that does render greater meaning to life.

I think a good sign is when you don't go to bed with people right away. I think you treasure it more. A lot of people, one date or third date or fourth date, you gotta go to bed. It's silly.

I'm sure I had a certain presence. It just happened. I didn't have too big of a problem with it because my family grounded me very well and I didn't understand what fame is and the corruption that fame could bring. I was too naive. I was very much a kid. I believed that people just loved me.

There are a lot of stereotypes to be broken which I think a lot of us are doing. What I do is, as soon as people try to pin me down to one kind of part, I'll play a very different kind of role, so it explodes that stereotype.

All teenagers have this desire to somehow run away.

The lowest budget U.S. films are ten times times better than shooting in Tibet.

There are many ways you can make money. Certain ways will make you happy, certain other ways will make other people happy. But if you go in because there's money in there, you're bound to fail, bound to fail!

I won't waste people's time. I won't bitch. I won't complain because I understand how hard it is by being a director. So it's all good.

And in Chinese language, there is a saying about children and mother. It's like, uh, you're 10 fingers to your heart, as if there is distance there, but if you chop your hand, it hurts like hell. This is the connection. And there is not another bond that's stronger. This is the strongest bond ever

I very much avoid crowds even today. Crowds scare me. I function much better on a more personal level. I don't function very well on a dinner of more than ten. I can't be myself.

I don't believe beauty exists without suffering-that's just a tourist picture in a travel agency, which isn't beautiful to me.

Ma's world is so narrow, ... She's always been an appendage of someone else. That's how her father brought her up. So you ache for her to experience life ... to become liberated, emancipated.

All Asian parents are into your children having a respectable, decent stable job. Acting was unimaginable to my parents.

As an actress I find the most enjoyable part of acting is really just to please the director. I just want to please my director.

I did somehow manage to get into a college in China that trains diplomats when I was 17, one year before my peers could go, which is very very difficult. I was very proud I did.

I submitted the script and they gave me a list of changes to make, and I did not agree with the changes.

To be an Asian, to be a minority, not to see ourselves as always me the minority, the victim, you the dominant culture. It's a shift of paradigm. Once you see things differently, you gain power. All of a sudden there is enlightenment.

If you know how to do a job very well, you keep doing it.

I never went on an audition - when they were really looking at everybody.

How do you explain certain physical qualities that somehow sell on screen? You're born with it... Certain people are just more watchable, and I was more watchable, but I don't think I understood acting or drama very well when I was a kid.

Both my parents are very hard-working, very caring, studious people. They take their profession very very seriously. Especially in China, there is not much of a reward other than saving lives. So I have a very very high respect for the profession of medicine. That could be a subconscious reason.

I wanted to do pre-med. The first semester it really didn't matter because you took a lot of general education requirements. But right after the first semester I kind of knew I wasn't cut out for that. I had very good grades but I somehow wasn't satisfied. Just having good grades and having it all go to medical school didn't make me happy.

I went to California to study drama and study film, still with the goal of going back to China. I stayed for at least four years and then I visited China. I was a little lost. I was very homesick. I took a risk, I went back to China and realized that I have actually changed, that China as a whole wasn't what I imagined it to be.

I would never offer advice without the person asking for it. I, in general, don't believe in giving advice, actually, as a human being I don't.

I won't ever encourage this temptress to grow. I don't give her any opportunity in my life, but I'm sure it's there. I understand her.

In a way, I think I made a more aesthetic choice than a political one, but politics was so part of my everyday life when I was growing up, ... I guess that was inevitable, but it was in our upbringing and education that no beauty can be achieved without suffering.

I am not the best girlfriend or lawyer or the reporter. I am the drama-queen type. You know. So it is somehow in my style, in my upbringing, in the way I look I need to be the dramatic one.

For the past few years, I was the more visible Asian performer, and I think it gave young girls a kind of role model showing it's possible to actually reach success doing movies.

The romantic love we feel toward the opposite sex is probably one extra help from God to bring you together, but that's it. All the rest of it, the true love, is the test.

Acting for me is not a bad habit like smoking that I must make an effort to quit. I love acting; I love directing.

I wish I could spend a little more time with friends. That's one bad thing, because I'm not so reliable as a friend other than getting me on the phone.

I don't find intimate scenes more difficult than other scenes.