My only qualifications to be an actor were that I'm daring, and I'm a quick learner. I've always learnt by watching what other people do. It's the same with my writing. I write what I know. Structurally, I write in a very undisciplined way.
I am interested in the gap between what people say and what they think - the undiscovered world of people's lives. Lives of quiet desperation.
When you're undocumented, you're supposed to keep your head down and be quiet and pay taxes, social security - even though people don't know that we do those things - and not say anything.
Undocumented people get arrested all the time. I get arrested, and it's front-page news. I feel guilt.
You know, I'm one of millions of undocumented people in this country who are living kind of under the shadows. And in many ways, coming out, it was my way of - at the end of the day, I think we have to tell the truth about this immigration system. And because of that, I had to tell the truth about myself.
In Tagalog, we call undocumented people 'TNT,' which means tago ng tago, which means 'hiding and hiding.' So that's literally what undocumented means in Tagalog. And that kind of tells you how Filipinos think of this issue, and really any culture, right?
I would have given my own life if I could have undone the killing of white men by my people.
We don't sit down and go, 'People are uneasy about the economy. Let's write about that.'
When I think of the things I have, it makes me a little uneasy. I don't want people to think I've lost touch with reality.
It would be better, in a way, if any adults present were completely uneducated. There is nothing children like more than passing on information they have just discovered to people who may not already have it - an elderly grandmother, for instance.
First of all, just because the Tea Party people appear to be generally uneducated, ignorant about the political process, ignorant about economics, confused about their own platform from the beginning, and indelicate when it comes to the craft of diplomacy, doesn't mean they're wrong.
People say I owe a lot to television. The fact is I was a star long before television. What TV made me is unemployed.
I've heard the argument that unemployment benefits somehow act as a disincentive to the long-term unemployed when it comes to looking for work, but the opposite is true. Unemployment Insurance serves as a powerful incentive for people to keep searching for jobs, rather than drop out of the labor force altogether.
I have a lot of hard-working, blue-collar people in my district who are at the end of their unemployment benefits.
More people on unemployment benefits is not success in America, fewer people on not because we kicked them off but because they have been able to get a job in the private sector, because government got out of the way.
In 2012, I helped lead the successful effort in Congress to allow states to conduct drug testing of people receiving unemployment benefits.
They keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job, because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does.
High mandated minimum wages will throw people out of work and onto the welfare rolls in cases where unemployment benefits exist. When it comes to welfare payments, they obey the laws of economics, too. Indeed, if something - like unemployment - is subsidized, more of it will be produced.
Because a person has to be either working or looking for work to be counted as part of the labor force, an increase in the number of people too discouraged to continue their search for work would reduce the unemployment rate, all else being equal - but not for a positive reason.
People aren't stupid. I mean, people remember in 1990, the unemployment rate was 10 percent. Now it's 4 _ percent. We've got 1/4 million jobs that we've created.
