Nahnatchka Khan

“I grew up watching television as a kid. It was always something I wanted to pursue.”

“You can be layered and more than one thing - you can exist outside of the box.”

“I never had a backup plan. I've only been good at one thing. I admire people who are jacks-of-all-trades. That's not me.”

“I think a lot of quote-unquote 'comedic actors' really go for the laugh and are overly straining and sort of trying.”

“There's some actors that go easily between drama and comedy because they play the naturalism of the role, and they just have natural timing.”

“Networks love data. They love to be able to look at numbers and try to predict what they think will work.”

“I'm not Chinese, but both of my parents were born in Iran; my brother and I were the first ones born here. First in our family to go to college, that whole thing.”

“If you want to be a writer, you have to learn to write in other people's voices until you get the chance to write in your own.”

“Sometimes you can't really control the language around you. All you can do is follow your voice and your path - dedicate yourself to stories that matter.”

“I've always been passionate about movies, TV, and writing, and I've been working so hard at it for so long. There were lots of setbacks, but I loved it so much, there was no alternative.”

“With 'Always Be My Maybe,' this has to be funny; this has to be entertaining. And then, when we stop for these moments with the characters that are emotional, you kind of feel it more because it's a little bit unexpected.”

“It's cool to be able to use comedy as a way to make people feel like they're a part of a bigger collective rather than as a way to divide.”

“Stuff starts to feel stale comedically when you're just rehashing things, so putting together a writers' room where the majority is made up of people who have not been the focus of the story, it flips everything around.”

“'Modern Family' is unique in that it's telling the story of three different families, which is a huge amount of characters to service.”

“Women behaving badly has always been funny, to me personally, so I knew I wanted to do something like that.”

“The family sitcom has been around forever, since the advent of television. I don't need to reinvent it. But if you take something and you do it in a way that you haven't necessarily seen before, that's right where I live.”

“I was Persian-American, but I hated bringing Persian food to school. I just didn't want to stand out in that way. I wanted to be like everybody else.”

“My parents certainly didn't understand TV comedy. They wouldn't turn on 'Married... With Children' and laugh.”

“For immigrant families, television is what connects you to American culture, but it's also what makes you feel like an outsider.”

“I've read many great samples, both of existing shows I liked and original pilots, and definitely hired the writers - or, at least, tried to!”