Joan Chen Quotes

#1. Acting is actually private.

Joan Chen

#2. 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!

Joan Chen

#3. Since my mom is the President of Ballet Hawaii, I'm always in touch with stuff going on.

Joan Chen

#4. How I was raised is what I am today.

Joan Chen

#5. I take class. I'm always ballet ready. I'm ready to go - got my tights and my shoes.

Joan Chen

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

Joan Chen

#7. 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.

Joan Chen

#8. 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.

Joan Chen

#9. 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.

Joan Chen

#10. It's the sacrifice I'm not willing to make right now to leave my children because I felt it wasn't only my choice.

Joan Chen

#11. I know what actors fear, what they like; I know how to get things out of them and I listen to them better, since I've been there.

Joan Chen

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

Joan Chen

#13. 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.

Joan Chen

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

Joan Chen

#15. The difference between me and American-born actors is that I came here with the expectation of not being treated fairly.

Joan Chen

#16. 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.

Joan Chen

#17. 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.

Joan Chen

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

Joan Chen

#19. I miss directing. I see stories in images and music more so than in dialogue.

Joan Chen

#20. I will always have a career. I believe in working. I don't believe that taking care of your house and children is enough for a woman. You don't feel complete.

Joan Chen

#21. 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.

Joan Chen

#22. I grew up in Honolulu. It's not the ballet cultural mecca by any stretch of the imagination. People are much more familiar with hula than they are with ballet.

Joan Chen

#23. 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.

Joan Chen

#24. 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.

Joan Chen

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

Joan Chen

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

Joan Chen

#27. Not very many companies go through Hawaii on their way to anywhere. San Francisco Ballet was the only company I remember, and Bolshoi, coming through Hawaii when I was younger.

Joan Chen

#28. The young people, they don't knock on the door politely and say "May I come in?" They barge in, they take your seat, and you're obsolete unless you recreate and somehow find grace somewhere else. Another profession may not be like that.

Joan Chen

#29. My fairy-tale life ended the moment I wanted to apply for a passport.

Joan Chen

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

Joan Chen

#31. 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.

Joan Chen

#32. I enjoy going back to work now because cinema is going through an exciting period because young people are now going back to the movie theaters. But things are different though.

Joan Chen

#33. I went to the International Ballet competition when I was 15 or 16 and that was the first time I competed. I didn't get very far but it was the first time that I realized what I needed to do to become a dancer. I realized how hard it was.

Joan Chen

#34. I love any opportunity to be able to dance. It's in my blood. I mean, I need to do it as an artist. I need to always do it.

Joan Chen

#35. All teenagers have this desire to somehow run away.

Joan Chen

#36. I'm more interested in ... I'm more of a descendent. I'm more critical. It comes from a different place and nowadays the young people know how to make just light entertainment.

Joan Chen

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

Joan Chen

#38. I danced in a Lifetime film. We shot in Canada and I got to work with a lot of the dancers who do So You Think You Can Dance, Canada.

Joan Chen