I do like the ladies an awful lot. Surprisingly enough, it turns out ladies like me back; I'm a really good guy.

People have always questioned, Was I crazy? And I'm like, 'No, I'm not crazy. I'm just totally committed.'

All I'll say is... I'm at a point in life when nothing feels shocking to me. I need something to shock me! I'm almost ready to see a U.F.O.

I have a hell-fire temper.

I have done quite a few things that I'm not proud of. But now I can equate it to artistry without an outlet. At school, I couldn't help but colour outside the lines. My passion just caused my reactions to be that much more volatile.

Honestly, this face of mine will always be familiar to people. It's that unique quality, man. If it's a dark and crowded room, people are just able to point me out. I think I'll always be famous. I just hope I don't become infamous.

My first rap name was Ralo. Because my first name is Carlos. I likened myself to what Busta Rhymes was doing when he first came out. And what Onyx did when they first came out - they reminded me of me.

All art stems from a place of alienation. Intimate and alone. Most people are oppressed by the opinion of others, but I was not that way. I was afraid of the repercussions of not doing what I was told to do, what I was called to do by a creator.

I want to burn as a beacon of possibility. I don't want nobody to misconstrue the commercial success I've had as anything other than an example of what black music is capable of. And what it's capable of is being more than just black. I'm not black or white anymore. I'm Cee Lo Green.

The fact that you can love something that's lost is all of the incentive that you'll ever need to love again as opposed to becoming comfortably numb.

I believe that the plight of life and all existence is to master one's self, you know, one day at a time.

Ultimately, I'm a fan of music. I describe writing music sometimes as hieroglyphics, like, you know, excavating, gently brushing off these artifacts and discovering the song underneath it all. It seems as if it is already written in it.

I am a rare occasion. I think if everyone had known it was going be me who succeeded, they would have supported me a lot more. They would have known what to do with me a lot earlier. They just didn't know.

I get a kick out of not being ideal. I think it's awesome. That's entirely the point. And I think my creator is quite a character for letting that be.

Predictability is the cousin of death: I don't necessarily want people to see me coming. You know?

I'm a normal guy at heart. But on stage, they don't pay me for normal.

I would like to be a gang leader on 'Sons of Anarchy' or own a lemonade stand on 'Boardwalk Empire.'

My varied listening palette is all-inclusive of all walks of life. No one individual is exempt from the human experience, so it is that intangible that is a universal truth. In that regard, I've had success in encapsulating something cosmic.

I'm drawn to the unconventional because I've been drawn unconventionally. I believe that I'm supposed to topple over these false images of what's idealistically beautiful. Because, of course, these intangible qualities are very attractive to women. Sincerity. Sense of humor. Success.

I'm not trying to emulate or imitate. But I do believe that I embody that spirit from Robert Johnson on up.

You can't be all of the people you're influenced by, so you make your own filter and create your own beautiful, unique thing in the world. Soak up the world, man, and make something of your own.

Music is a means of spreading the good word and spreading positivity and productivity. Those things speak to me.

I was one of those kids, inner-city youth and finding my way. I made it. I made a success out of myself, surprisingly.

To lose my mother just as I'm right on the brink of crossing that threshold over into a career, it was pretty compelling. My entire career is my mother's work, for me.

It's easy to feel helpless - like you can't fight the tide. But remember: small actions can have a huge impact, and one person like you can inspire others to action.

Somewhere in the Commandments of Reviewing must be written, 'Thou shalt not compare Asians to non-Asians.'

I think, in the United States, we talk about race as a black and white issue... We're generally talking about it as if it's a binary equation whereas, in fact, there's more than two races and, in fact, those races blend together. There are a lot of different ways that people identify.

I moved to Shaker Heights from Pittsburgh, PA, just before I turned 10.

A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up - sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a flower, and sometimes with a quick knife-slice.

No reader wants to sit through the same scene four times in a row, unless they're radically different.

There's a great joy in writing about a place you know very well, but there's also a lot of responsibility in trying to be accurate. It's a lot like writing about a relative: you can see both their strengths and their shortcomings, and even as you want to be honest, you want people to see the good that's there as well.

What I remember about race relations in the 1990s is that you showed your awareness by saying you didn't see race, that you were colour-blind.

Comparing Asian writers mainly to other Asian writers implies that we're all telling the same story - a disappointingly reductive view.

For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.

If you see harassment happening, speak up. Being harassed is terrible; having bystanders pretend they don't notice is infinitely worse.

My parents came to America in the late 1960s because my father studied for a Ph.D. in Indiana. My mother joined him later. We had ancestors who came over at the turn of the century. One worked in a laundry, as is typical of Chinese-American immigrants.

I wrote 'Little Fires Everywhere' and sold the book in 2015, still the Obama years. The possibility of a Trump presidency was not on my radar.

Buying new books supports the writer by providing both a royalty and an audience; a writer whose book sells well has a better chance of selling another.

I don't think of myself as a mystery or thriller writer, honestly. I am in awe of mystery writers and don't think I have what it takes to write such a book.

Spend too much time alone with your own words, and your writing grows anemic, in dire need of a transfusion.

Gore isn't required for a good story, but adversity is.

I was fortunate to have many teachers who encouraged me - one of the first was Dianne Derrick, my 5th grade teacher at Woodbury Elementary. She challenged us to write creatively and praised my work, but most importantly, she treated writing like it was important.

I don't think I know a single person who's a minority who hasn't experienced some form of discrimination at one time or another.

Of course, as a kid, I had no idea what was practical: I wanted to be a paleontologist, then an astronaut.

I began using the #smallacts hashtag on Twitter shortly after the 2016 election as a way to resist. To resist the intolerance growing in our nation, to resist an upcoming administration that I believe threatens to pull us backward and strip rights from those already marginalized.

As the Trump administration takes office - and we see acts of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination around the country - ask yourself, 'What's important to me? What do I care about? What have I benefitted from that I want to pay forward?' Then look for ways to spread help and hope.

Books by women, people of color, LGBTQ authors, differently abled people, and non-Americans are a great way of broadening horizons and building empathy.

Local politics is just as important as national - and often easier to influence.

In the case of 'Everything I Never Told You,' my goal was to make the experiences of a family that had always felt marginalised feel accessible and understandable even to people who'd never been in that situation.

I am a first-generation Chinese-American; my husband is white. We have a little boy, so I think a lot about what it's like when people from different cultures and backgrounds start families, and how the world sees them. Most of my friends are in interracial relationships, and I just wonder what the world is going to look like for their children.