Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love strong female characters.
If you try to describe NASCAR to anyone, you sound crazy.
In comedy, it's so subjective; there is no right or wrong.
My family never took vacations growing up. It just wasn't a thing.
Special things happen when you center people who haven't been centered before.
You can be layered and more than one thing - you can exist outside of the box.
I went to USC and got my first break writing for a kids' show called 'Pepper Ann.'
Some people don't have a sense of humor about certain things, and other people do.
I grew up watching television as a kid. It was always something I wanted to pursue.
Find like-minded people who are on the same page as you, and then lift each other up.
You can be a successful woman and also be vulnerable, and that's important to show people.
When you take stock, there are so many more choices and points of view that are necessary.
The first time I ever wrote anything, it was an editorial column for my high school newspaper.
Comedy always benefits from different points of view and even tension. It can never be satisfied.
You don't have to be just one thing. I think that applies to women in front of and behind the camera.
This is going to sound weird, but when I was a little kid, the Iron Sheik was really big in our house.
Networks love data. They love to be able to look at numbers and try to predict what they think will work.
Women behaving badly has always been funny, to me personally, so I knew I wanted to do something like that.
Not everybody can see every moment of their life displayed by one set of people. It's just not going to happen.
I think a lot of quote-unquote 'comedic actors' really go for the laugh and are overly straining and sort of trying.
Randall Park and Ali Wong, they are so many things; they're not just one thing, they're bigger than just their identity.
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.
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.
For immigrant families, television is what connects you to American culture, but it's also what makes you feel like an outsider.
'Fresh Off the Boat' will be syndicated. This show and these characters will live forever in the pantheon of classic family sitcoms.
'Modern Family' is unique in that it's telling the story of three different families, which is a huge amount of characters to service.
Using humor as a wedge into different kinds of stories is my go-to. I think anything I do would have some sort of streak of humor in it.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
Working in network sitcom arenas, whenever you decide to depart from the norm and tell a story that's not typical, I think you're always a little bit nervous.
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.
When we were growing up, the only person we saw on TV that vaguely resembled us was the Iron Sheik - the pro wrestler whose signature move was the 'Camel Clutch.'
If you take a step back, you realize that the TV landscape really has been... There have been some amazing shows in terms of representation, but not for Asian people.
It's something that's almost taken for granted in sitcoms about white families. Like, 'Oh, we're going on a summer vacation!' As if that's something that everybody does.
Whatever I do - whether it's directing, producing - I just come at things from characters, from stories, from jokes and scene rhythms. I'll always have that at the epicenter, I think.
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.
Writing in another person's voice is a skill you have to develop when you're working on someone else's show. But if you can maintain your perspective, that's what will make you stand out.
In terms of leadership, you've got to allow for people to be amazing and to contribute in a way that's meaningful. You can't hold on so tight that people don't get a chance to do what they do best.
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.
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.
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.
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.