Tanya Saracho

“I feel like progress will be made in the landscape of Latino influence when we get to tell those murky, real, close-to-life narratives.”

“I never wanted to be married. That was never a thing for me.”

“When you get a bunch of Latinxs together, we get to handle our stories. A cultural shorthand happens.”

“To me, 'Kita y Fernanda' is very much an American story, and I know some people are going to think it's a Latina story, but it's about shifting people's paradigms and views of what it is to be American.”

“I don't think that 'Vida' is just for Latinos. I don't think 'One Day at a Time''s just for Latinos.”

“I didn't understand that TV writing wasn't writing; it was pitching.”

“I always have something big enough to say as a playwright. It's storytelling.”

“I dress up cute sometimes to go to work, but TV writers don't! They just go however.”

“When you work in a writers room for a showrunner, you serve that story, and you serve that showrunner. I don't think it should be called writing; I think it should be called rendering content. Because you are there to render the content that is agreed upon in the room, and you're serving the voice of the main storyteller, which is the showrunner.”

“In TV, you're a 'writer for hire.' That means you're trying to guess what your boss wants and delivering that story. There's a lot of spitballing. The big thing is 'breaking story,' which means coming up with a story. You do it by episode and put it all up on a board.”

“I have 16 plays, and we don't ever do subtitles. You can't do subtitles in the theater, so I was like, 'I'm not gonna do subtitles.' You'll never lose the story. There might be a little joke that you might miss, but you'll never miss the story, even in the Spanglish of it.”

“I'm queer - and queer, to me, is not being stuck in a binary and being kind of fluid.”

“I'm obsessed with accents.”

“When I got to 'Looking,' I didn't know that you could write stuff and they would put it on TV. That was that experience. My boss was Andrew Haigh and he came from film; he had never done TV. It was his first TV show, and he was running it. And I think he was like, 'Write it, and we'll put it on.' It was lovely.”

“Other people started taking me seriously before I took myself seriously.”

“Sometimes, when I was the only person of color in a room, you had to defend all the people of color everywhere.”

“I know people seek me out to be their mentor, and I've chosen a few people I'm really invested in and nurturing their career and their aesthetic and just their person.”

“When I got to Scotland, I signed up on a site called Meetup. It's like these group things you can do - a poetry reading, a hike, whatever.”

“I am so homesick every day of the week.”

“I'm sad about my theatre career, but I've also fallen a bit in love with TV!”