Top 44 Tanya Saracho Quotes

At Shondaland, six out of nine writers were of color – not Latinx, but I was like, ‘Wait, I can do that but for the whole room?’ ‘Atlanta’ had done that, then I can do that.

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.

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.

I just wanted to put together the best Latinx writers. I didn’t care about the level.They have a passion for ‘Vida’ in a different way, in a higher way.

I remember ‘Resurrection Boulevard.’ It was on for such a brief moment, but they were trying to do a good, Latino, Mexican-American family with a patriarch.

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

I always have something big enough to say as a playwright. It’s storytelling.

I adore ‘Broad City,’ but the one Latino is queer for jokes. You see queerness of Latinos in this emasculated with an accent or fez on a set ’70s show. It’s always like, ‘Ha, ha, funny emasculated immigrants.’

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

I have been watching male programming all my life. And I’m completely interested in it. Like, I love ‘Breaking Bad’ and I like ‘Game of Thrones.’

Any time you have to move in two days, it’s crazy. It’s like, ‘Who am I going to get to take care of my cat?

I hope to see more Latino stories on television – not just on a personal level, but for us in the industry. We shouldn’t just exist when a show is attempting to be diverse. We have good stories, and we are worth it.

The big, radical thing that I’m trying to do is to portray Latinas as complex human beings.

I’m obsessed with accents.

My first time up to bat as a showrunner, what I did was hire an all-Latinx writers room. And it’s a diverse Latinx writers room – we have an Afro-Dominican and Texicans and Chileans. It’s diverse within its Latinidad.

I would like to do more millennial, Latina, complicated stories.

I get a lot of emails of scripts and pilots, and they want me to give feedback, and sometimes I can’t because it’s so many.

I was a playwright who was still learning the ropes when Starz took a chance on me to create and showrun ‘Vida.’ They nurtured and supported me during every step of the strenuous process, and that is a debt that cannot be repaid.

Putting on makeup before work is a meditative exercise. It incites me to think about how I’ll tackle my day.

Glutton things, those are things that are dangerous for me. My grandma and my aunt died of diabetes; I’m borderline diabetic.

I want to stay in Chicago.

When I was in school, I didn’t get exposed to Latino playwrights.

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

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

I am not a quiet person.

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.

It’s mountains. The air is crisp. It’s peaceful. You don’t get spring break in Guanajuato.

I’m queer – and queer, to me, is not being stuck in a binary and being kind of fluid.

Nothing against resorts or Cancun or Carlos ‘n Charlie’s, but Guanajuato is different. If you want history, culture, and peace, it’s perfect.

You’re on set more when you produce an episode, and it’s long hours, but you learn so much.

You can’t visit Guanajuato without going to the mummy museum.

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 was obsessed with everything about ‘Outlander’ – the stories, the way it looked. I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to go to Scotland, and I’m going to find my own ‘Outlander.”

So many times, shows say they’re set somewhere – like in Chicago, ‘The Good Wife’ – but it doesn’t feel like Chicago.

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’m very conscious of who I work with. Because I want to develop and nurture my writers so they can have their own shows, take on whatever is next for them.

When ‘Vida’ got the green light, Starz sent me this picnic basket of Jamie Fraser red wine and all these ‘Outlander’ things that I’ll never open because it’s like my sacred thing.

I’m always writing. There’s no stopping. It’s just that you can’t see it sometimes.

I am equally a writer and an actor and a director.

Raul Castillo was my first high school boyfriend.

There is no ‘generic’ Latina.

For so long, the narrative – I’m speaking for Latinx – we’ve been invisible, the ones cleaning and taking care of your kids and doing your lawns.

When you’re a starving artist, you make do. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know where my rent was coming from.