Quotes from Gene Luen Yang

A lot of Asians and Asian-Americans have liver problems. If you basically ask anybody who is Asian, they or one of their relatives will have some sort of a liver issue, and the liver actually falls into the jurisdiction of the gastroenterologist.

I general don't color my stuff - I'm pretty horrible with color. Usually, I'll get one of my cartoonist friends to help me out.

My experiences growing up in both a Chinese American household and the Catholic Church define much of who I am.

I was really worried that sitting at home by myself in front of a computer was going to make me crazy.

In academia in general, there's this push toward using comics as an educational tool.

In my classroom, I would start my lessons with a quick review of an old topic. Then, I would introduce a new topic. Finally, I would give my students a problem to solve on their own, one that would reinforce what I'd just taught.

I liked interacting with students. I liked having coworkers. For a long time, I was really worried that sitting at home by myself in front of a computer was going to make me crazy.

I minored in creative writing in college, and I've played with the idea of doing something more hybrid, but comics are my first love.

Religion and culture are two important ways in which we as humans find our identity. That's certainly true for me.

I'm a cartoonist. I write and draw comic books and graphic novels. I'm also a coder.

I noticed that when my daughter was born, my son really, really liked her. But then as she started getting older, and as she started crawling around our house and touching different things that were his, sibling rivalry issues started appearing.

Creativity requires input, and that's what research is. You're gathering material with which to build.

I finished 'American Born Chinese' in 2005, so after that, I started actively researching the Boxer Rebellion.

For 'Boxers & Saints,' I started by reading a couple of articles on the Internet, then writing a really rough outline, then getting more hardcore into the research. I went to a university library once a week for a year, year and a half.

In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry.

During the Cultural Revolution, the communists came in, and what they wanted to do was eradicate all sense of traditional Chinese culture.

I talk about religion because it's one of the ways human beings find power and belonging. Religion is more than just that - I think faith traditions give us ways to talk about experiences of the numinous, too - but power and belonging are a big part of it.

The project that I did between 'Boxer & Saints' was 'The Shadow Hero,' which is illustrated by Sonny Liew, an artist who lives in Singapore.

At any comic book convention in America, you'll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.

There's something about the intimacy of comics that gives you a false bravado; you don't always consider the consequences.

Writing, for me, is very inspiration-dependent. And inspiration can be a jerk.

I love hearing people who are smarter than me talk about my comics. It makes me feel smarter.

I majored in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley and worked as a software developer for a couple of years. Then I taught high school computer science for over a decade and a half in Oakland, California.

When I looked into the lives of the Chinese saints, I discovered that many of them had died during the Boxer Rebellion, a war that occurred on Chinese soil in the year 1900.