Tracie Thoms Quotes

Telling diverse stories is at the heart of our culture.

I believe that everyone has a story, and it is important that we encourage all students to tell theirs.

I feel like you are allowed in fiction to embrace imagination and try to enter other worlds. And I feel like you should push yourself to try to persuade your reader that you have the authority to engage with people who, you know, lived in the past, who live in the future, other genders, other places, other cultures.

For minority actors, developing our own projects has to be the eventual path. We have a lot of stories to tell and a really unique voice. But none of that is going to be heard as long as we're just the hired hands, acting.

Audiences want great story telling; it's why white people watch my show 'Black in America.' It's why black people watch 'Latina in America.' All of that is statistically shown and proven but it was because it was good story telling about people who were outsiders.

I want to be able to work on a project that will give people around the world the chance to represent their own people, their own culture, their own stories, rather than just Hollywood - really, you know, dominated Hollywood. And that's a dream of mine.

Novels are longer than life.

I'd love to see more novels and short stories where the characters have their own folklore that isn't the Plot-Bearing Prophecy of Doom.

The cool thing about Kyle Killen, he writes really defined characters. I was a big fan of 'Awake' and also 'Lone Star.' I just think that he's a really, really special writer, and complex and deep, and a really smart dude.

I want our young Latinos and Latinas to write their hearts out and express their hearts out and let us all listen to each other.

I've made it my mission to make movies starring African American actors and about the African American experience and put them in the mainstream. They're very universal stories I've told - every movie I've done.

As a writer, as much as I try, I can't stop writing female characters. They have so much more to offer; they have to wear so many different hats. There's so much wonderful gray matter in a female's life that it just makes for a stronger character.

I do hope the success of 'Ms. Marvel' will open doors for other characters and other creators.

We still have to create things for African American women. Just like Tyler Perry is doing it, we can't wait for things to happen; you have to go and make and create roles and go to people.

I grew up watching cinema in my country that wasn't telling stories about us, and we had to find a way to connect, and our references, our role models had nothing to do with us. And I'm so glad that it's changing.

It's very important to me that people get to see themselves in stories. When someone tells me they've never seen themselves, I have a new goal.

It's very difficult to be asking other people for opportunities. It is much more empowering to be creating opportunities, to be the one who is saying, 'Look, I'm going to take this from the ground up and create a story that is meaningful to me as an Asian American and cast it with Asian Americans and have Asian Americans writing it.'

It's not enough to be diverse in your casting. You have to service those characters; you have to make them fully well rounded because people are watching.

It's important to tell the story you're telling in the right way, which might involve black people or people of whatever heritage or ethnicity - or it might not.

My interest as an artist is to illuminate the lives of black folks. I definitely am focused on films that illustrate all that we are and all our nuance and all our complicated beauty and mess, and when you're telling those stories, you gotta have black actors.

I think you leave your imprint on every screenplay. I like to bring my experience as a woman to all my female characters that hopefully makes them a little more layered and complex.

I am doing what I can to expand the tent and bring up other people and make sure we are telling different kinds of stories.

I want to keep doing projects that speak for people within the community and tell different types of meaningful stories.

Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I'm not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I'm telling very specific stories.

What I'm really excited for is to see the evolution of trans characters and see more diverse stories be told, so that every time we're on screen, we're not really playing the part of educator and having to explain the experience to the audience, because it will have already been normalized.