Julio Torres

“I'm inept at knowing the lives of the people behind the things I love.”

“In 2012 I spent a summer rushing to get a visa sponsor, and sort of discovering myself in the process.”

“A lot of the work that I'm interested in taps into childhood, because it's just such a period where the imagination can be what it is. It's where I feel I was truly formed.”

“I love the color clear.”

“I find having a mortal body to be such a humiliating burden and such a horrible thing to deal with. I would love it if I could not have a body. Oh, my God, if I could be a ghost and still do all the work that I do and just live my life? I don't mind if I couldn't touch anything! That would be heaven to me.”

“As a kid, I was always very into secondary characters - things that weren't supposed to be the focus. The kind of people that I'm attracted to are the kind of people that wouldn't be main characters. I don't like main character energy.”

“You know, I feel like the first attempts of an artist diving into a new forum is that you try and compare it to or make it look like other things that you've seen, and it takes like some to be like, oh wait, no, I can actually do it my own way.”

“For such a big chunk of my comedy career, I was very into the idea of ice and diamonds and silver.”

“My father always fostered creativity, and he has always encouraged me and my mom and my sister to create things.”

“When I had graduated college and I was on a mission to find a way to stay in the country, which as an international student is not easy, I was very disciplined and I only wore black and white because I thought, I don't need any stimulus that's not productive.”

“I have a love-hate relationship with Disney. As a kid, I loved it. But growing up I realized the one-sided idea of life that Disney brings in the world.”

“My grades were horrible. My ambitions were big and my GPA was low. The New School admitted me, but they didn't give me enough scholarship money and I couldn't take loans, because I didn't have credit and neither did my parents. So I went to two years of advertising school in El Salvador, because it felt close enough to being a storyteller.”

“I hate the idea that representation is a sign of goodness in a company.”

“Craigslist was something I was very well-versed in once upon a time with the gig section and getting jobs through there.”

“Let's not kid ourselves, companies and corporations only do things if they believe it'll be in their best financial interest.”

“I have been placed in situations early on where I felt like, 'Am I checking a box?' But I don't think that the work that I've done - and that I'm proud of - checks any boxes.”

“We strike so that our industry lives up to the values we so successfully sell to the public, so that we can go beyond the presentation, beyond inspiration and into the actual practice of good.”

“I feel like I'm constantly tangled in some kind of bureaucratic web and constantly making the tangible philosophical. Constantly trying to win philosophical battles and turn things into disputes about ideas rather than realities. I don't want to just talk about the thing; I want to talk about why the thing exists.”

“When people come into my home and they're like, 'Should I take my shoes off?' I say, 'You do whatever you want to do.' At the end of the day, my floor being dirty matters less to me than you being comfortable. Do whatever you want to do.”

“If there's one thing you should know about me it's that I'm utterly unsuited for bureaucracy. I don't know my passwords to anything. I have thousands and thousands of unread emails. I don't open mail because I assume it'll be bad news. I've never had a credit card.”