Nahnatchka Khan

“If I waited to write only for a Persian lesbian, I'd still be waiting. But I can write for straight white men because those are the jobs.”

“You can be a successful woman and also be vulnerable, and that's important to show people.”

“The more visibility, the more opportunities for Asian-American actors to play great roles. It goes to the studios opening up roles they might not have considered Asian actors for. The talent is there. I don't think there needs to be one superstar, but having more roles open up, that's the way changes happen.”

“I love strong female characters.”

“Special things happen when you center people who haven't been centered before.”

“In the writers' room, the challenge is always to tell interesting stories in unexpected ways, so we try to never limit ourselves in how we accomplish that.”

“Having a range of perspectives allows you to tell stories through a different lens and approach things from fresh angles. If you're straining everything through the same filter, you're always going to wind up with the same product.”

“Norman Lear was talking about everything in the '70s... race, sexism, all of it. The network comedy really stayed away from that in the 1980s and 1990s.”

“The idea of dealing with success is always interesting to us: You spend so long struggling to make good, and then what happens when you finally do?”

“Not everybody can see every moment of their life displayed by one set of people. It's just not going to happen.”

“Find like-minded people who are on the same page as you, and then lift each other up.”

“This is going to sound weird, but when I was a little kid, the Iron Sheik was really big in our house.”

“In comedy, it's so subjective; there is no right or wrong.”

“When you take stock, there are so many more choices and points of view that are necessary.”

“Not to say that I saw myself in the Iron Sheik, but our whole family would gather around the TV on Saturday and watch the Iron Sheik wrestle. And he was the bad guy, so everyone else was booing him and cheering whoever he was fighting - it was the opposite in our house.”

“When you start out as a TV writer, you get a lot of pressure from outside forces to fit into what they think people want.”

“'Seinfeld' was an amazing show. It's iconic and defined a whole generation of comedy writers - but by their own admission, that show was about nothing.”

“Randall Park and Ali Wong, they are so many things; they're not just one thing, they're bigger than just their identity.”

“Cable shows do 13 episodes. I get that. I can wrap my head around 13 episodes. You make them all, you post them all, and then you get to air them. The network cycle is way more intense. There's more episodes.”

“I went to USC and got my first break writing for a kids' show called 'Pepper Ann.'”