Julio Torres

“After writing for 'SNL,' I never felt like I was properly writing sketch comedy. I felt like I was writing like humorous short stories. And I missed that, and I kept wanting to do that.”

“Undocumented workers are the backbone of the backbone of New York City, of any major city really. To have the hardest jobs but also be legally banished from the protections everybody else is getting is just mortifying.”

“At Newark airport once, this person gave me a coral stone - this very smooth orange rock that was supposed to be for creativity. I've gotten a lot of stones from people, randomly. And I've kept all of them.”

“If you download an app and the app is clunky to use and it's hard to use, then in the next upgrade, the app improves. And that's because the corporation wants to retain you as a customer. But the visa system is not interested in improving, because it doesn't think it's to its benefit to make it easier.”

“To me, New York City is the scaffolding. It's the garbage... That's what I'm interested in.”

“I'm very interested in imbuing meaning, and emotion and thought into things that people might overlook as a way of showing them something that is surprisingly I think familiar.”

“Fantasmas' is very empathetic toward everyone who's onscreen. The characters are the kind of people you bump into that you might never see again but they made an impact on your life.”

“We strike so that the new me doesn't come to this country and instead of writing their own favorite story through their own eyes find that they can't because studios would rather use AI to plagiarize mine without my consent.”

“To me there's something so great about a singer who's very great and successful and does great work even though they don't have the best voice. Or a painter who's extremely successful in what they do but they can't draw like a realistic portrait. I find that very fun and very stimulating.”

“I was a really incompetent assistant to various people. If you had me as an assistant, something went wrong.”

“Gifts should be like hugs - if you want to give one and you have that kind of relationship with someone, then that's wonderful. But I don't like doing things out of expectation.”

“I can't think when I have stuff on my hands.”

“As a comedian, I started very apolitical. I definitely never talked about current events or matters of identity, or any of these topics that now weirdly I am intricately connected to.”

“I joined the WGA when I got a writing job at 'Saturday Night Live.' That job was the first time I ever experienced financial stability. My parents, a civil engineer and an architect, are both college-educated, hard-working, talented and productive, but live in a country where that's just not enough.”

“I think that when we are outside of the system, and when we're drowning, all we're thinking about is swimming and succeeding in it. And it takes - at least for me - a taste of that to be like, 'Wait, this whole thing's actually wrong.'”

“I'm attracted to otherworldliness.”

“I feel like I seem trustworthy, which is what got me a lot of jobs, and I have a personality that puts people at ease.”

“When I started doing stand-up, there were people who were like, 'Well, that's not stand-up.' Then I started writing sketch comedy, and it felt like people thought, 'Well, that's not sketch comedy.' Then, making 'Problemista,' that felt a little unclassifiable too, and it really was a head-scratcher for a lot of people.”

“New York has this thing where everything is slightly more pathetic than it attempts to be. Everything is going for something, but then you end up like seven steps below, if you're lucky, because everything is so difficult to maintain here.”

“I'm a very idea-first kind of person.”