Quotes from Tanya Saracho

When I got to Scotland, I signed up on a site called Meetup. It's like these group things you can do - a poetry reading, a hike, whatever.

Young men and women of color get told 'no' by so many people. But just listen to your inner voice. Amplify it. Make it strong!

I went in for a meeting with Marta Fernandez, and she said, 'We are looking for a female millennial show. Have you heard of the term 'chipster'?' And I was like, 'Of course - Chicana hipster.'

When I got to 'Looking,' I didn't know that you could write stuff and they would put it on TV. That was that experience. My boss was Andrew Haigh and he came from film; he had never done TV. It was his first TV show, and he was running it. And I think he was like, 'Write it, and we'll put it on.' It was lovely.

Sometimes people of color walk into these spaces that are dominated by the dominant culture, and we have to be better, not make as much trouble.

We don't have a lot of narrative on TV or film, mainstream film, of brown queers. Latina queers, I can't think of that many.

For so long, the narrative - I'm speaking for Latinx - we've been invisible, the ones cleaning and taking care of your kids and doing your lawns.

The thing is about 'Vida,' we're telling a very simple family narrative. There's nothing fancy about it.

I feel like progress will be made in the landscape of Latino influence when we get to tell those murky, real, close-to-life narratives.

It's mountains. The air is crisp. It's peaceful. You don't get spring break in Guanajuato.

The hierarchy plays out in the writers room, and you, as a staff writer, need to know your place.

At Shondaland, six out of nine writers were of color - not Latinx, but I was like, 'Wait, I can do that but for the whole room?' 'Atlanta' had done that, then I can do that.

When you're a starving artist, you make do. It didn't matter that I didn't know where my rent was coming from.

No one guided me through it, but here is how it happened: I was in New York doing a play, and an agent got in touch with me and said he wanted to take me out for lunch. In the theatre, they never want to take you out for lunch, so I thought, 'Yes!' I went, I ordered steak, and he told me he thought I should write for TV.

What I notice a lot about millennials is that they have agency over their sexuality.

I'm very conscious of who I work with. Because I want to develop and nurture my writers so they can have their own shows, take on whatever is next for them.

I know people seek me out to be their mentor, and I've chosen a few people I'm really invested in and nurturing their career and their aesthetic and just their person.

I'm always writing. There's no stopping. It's just that you can't see it sometimes.

I always have something big enough to say as a playwright. It's storytelling.

I'm queer - and queer, to me, is not being stuck in a binary and being kind of fluid.

I'm obsessed with accents.

I am equally a writer and an actor and a director.

To me, 'Kita y Fernanda' is very much an American story, and I know some people are going to think it's a Latina story, but it's about shifting people's paradigms and views of what it is to be American.

I don't think that 'Vida' is just for Latinos. I don't think 'One Day at a Time''s just for Latinos.