Constance Wu

“Everyone's going to fail at some point. Even if you choose the steadiest career, you're going to go through that.”

“I don't have the best family life. I'm not going to have a sob story and be like, my parents abandoned me, because they didn't. But they also are not that present. When I'm alone, I'm alone. I don't have anybody to call, and so I have to create meaning from myself.”

“If the writing is good, then the writing is already funny. All you have to do is make this funny writing true to the very deepest of your heart, and the fact that you are capable of making this true will be hysterical.”

“If the expression of and advocating for your values makes you lose a job or a person, then that person/job sorta just... wasn't your heart's tribe.”

“I'm constantly paranoid that I'll be unemployed for the rest of my life... and have to go back folding shirts at the Gap, which you know... you gotta do what you gotta do.”

“My family is Chinese-Taiwanese. I'm from Richmond, Virginia. The community in which I grew up was pretty white. The storybooks you got at school featured white children and an animal, or animals, and as you got older, the novels you were assigned were about, like, the problems of white boys and their dogs.”

“If somebody judges me, then they're not my people, and that's all right.”

“Make sure your work is never results-oriented. The result is a byproduct of the work, in a way.”

“I'd rather lose all my stuff than lose myself, because I've done that before, and that feels way worse.”

“I'm not a naturally social-media inclined person. I still prefer phone calls to texts/emails. I... hate texts.”

“People are embracing the thing that made them different growing up instead of letting that thing elicit shame.”

“You're never going to please everyone, and if you do, there's something wrong.”

“I'm okay with not having a super-secure lifestyle because if you're doing what you like, you don't need stuff to fill any empty holes.”

“People's passion and desire for authenticity is strong.”

“Specificity is what makes good storytelling, and good storytelling is what makes money, and making money is then what encourages new producers to invest in different stories about Asians.”

“My dad got a job as a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He teaches biology and genetics. My dad has been obsessed with science his whole life. Both my paternal grandparents were illiterate bamboo farmers, so he really worked his way up and then got a Ph.D., full ride and everything, from universities in America.”

“All the networks have always been willing to have ethnic people as the third or fourth lead or the best friend to the white person. But to actually let a black family or an Asian family carry a show, that's something where there hasn't really been a precedent set in terms of a real financial gain.”

“Being an actor, in and of itself, is just hard. You have to just do it for its own sake.”

“Working on 'Fresh Off the Boat' has been really enlightening to me because it's made me actually think about the roles that Asians and Asian-American women have played in media. Not because I didn't think it was important before, but because before, I was really focused on just paying my rent.”

“I was emotional. I wanted to be taken seriously. I was pretty emo. I was reciting Shakespeare monologues when I was 10. I still know the whole 'To be, or not to be...' monologue, because I knew it when I was 10.”