Mindy Kaling's Quotes

I always knew I wanted kids, but when my mom passed away I was like, 'I want a bunch of kids. I want three kids or four kids, and I want to have that relationship again.' I can't bring my mom back, but I can have children.

I am a super-confident writer, and as a joke writer and as an actress, I'm like, 'I want to go head-to-head with every person.' I am an Indian woman and I'm a kind of double minority in this world.

I feel like if I had my personality but was an OB/GYN, you would be psyched. You'd be like, 'My chatty, pop-culture-interested but plainspoken, wants-to-talk-about-clothes but serious-minded doctor.' I feel like I would clean up with patients. That's kind of a cocky thing to say.

I feel lucky because I was a nerd, which I talk about in the book, but I had academic success, so through that, because that's what my parents put a great deal of value on, I had a great childhood because I sort of fulfilled the expectations of being good at school.

I had these kind of unrealistic expectations that were fueled by romantic comedies, and it has both helped me and hurt me in many ways. It helped me because, in general, they've made me hopeful. I just figure things will eventually work out for me. But nobody is like any Tom Hanks character. Nobody is Hugh Grant. No one is Meg Ryan!

I hated L.A. for a long time, and I wanted to leave it. I had these fantasies of going to 'SNL' and falling in love with some writer on 'SNL,' of getting married and living in New York.

I have a great job writing for 'The Office,' but, really, all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I'll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is, like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.

I have a thick skin, which comes from being a not-really-skinny, dark-skinned Indian woman. I haven't fit in every place, and so I'm kind of used to resistance.

I love 'The Office.' I'm in the premiere, and I'm maybe gonna shoot another episode this season, but I've been there since the very beginning, so when I found out this is the last year - I am a good Asian kid who was an A student - I wish I could be there to the end to see things through.

I must have been 10 or 11, but anything Dana Carvey ever did, I just really loved. He was on for a long time, I don't really know when that era was. I could watch Dana Carvey with my parents, they loved him too. They loved all his characters.

I really love 'Bridget Jones's Diary' - and I love the book, too. You wonder how it ever got made into a movie. She's supposed to be chubby, and two of the hottest guys ever are straight-up fighting over her?

I used to forget that I was an Indian woman. I would even forget that I was a woman. I don't think of myself as bringing to the table a lot of 'women's issues.' I don't feel the need to write about maternity. I grew up thinking that the talented people in comedy were hard-joke writers.

I want a schedule-keeping, waking-up-early, wallet-carrying, picture-hanging man. I don't care if he takes prescription drugs for cholesterol or hair loss.

I went to Dartmouth College so simply by being an Indian-American woman, I was already so statistically interesting. And then the fact that I didn't want to do anything science-related, and I wanted to write comedy plays and act little bit - I mean, I became deeply interesting in college because of how rare that was.

I would love to be married. But it's not a necessity like the way that I feel I need and want to have children. It would be wonderful to have a husband, and I would feel blessed to do it. But I would feel sad for the rest of my life if I had no kids.

I'm not good at anything except writing jokes. I wasn't good at sports, I wasn't good at anything artsy, ever. I think there was a real worry for a while about what I would be good at. I was just this chubby little Indian kid who looked like a nerd.

I, like most women, I dress for other women, I think. If I was going to dress for men, I think in general I would be just wearing, like, a fitted black T-shirt and tight jeans every day.

If I could make a device where people could just intuit everything you are thinking - a little cable you plug into, like, a USB port, I would make a billion dollars.

If you've seen a photo of me from when I was a kid, I don't think anyone would have expected that going in front of the camera was something that I was going to do. I can't believe how little effort my parents put into making me seem like an appealing little girl.

In terms of my Indianness, I try not to rely on it nor deny it. When it comes up organically in my writing, we can address it. About five years ago, we wrote this episode of 'The Office,' called 'Diwali,' which seemed like an organic way of using it.

It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your 'portrayal' of women. Even when I started out on 'The Office' eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it's completely different.

It would be disingenuous of me to blanket-ly love everything a woman has produced simply to make a statement that we're all in this together. No. We're in Hollywood trying to be competitive, and get numbers, have our eyes on the Nielsens and things like that.

My dad's whole family is in Madras and I was born in America so we didn't have that big Indian community. I don't really have anything interesting to say about it. When I talk about it people are like, 'meh, let's talk about something else.'

Not to be weird, but I still have an ongoing relationship with my mom, even though she passed away, and I've been surprised at how much I've been able to convey to her. Now I sound like a total weirdo, but that's true.

People don't want to listen to a celebrity tweeting about their charities and shows. That's why comedy writers do well - we put out little funny ideas.

Right now, I'm hankering for new adventures... Ninety percent of the time I'm having romantic-comedy fantasies in which I'm wearing little pencil skirts and hurrying down to the subway.

The overlap in the Venn diagram of things that men hate for women to wear and the things that I love to wear, it's almost a full overlap on the Venn diagram, which is unfortunate for me.

There's the psychotic ambitious side of myself that wants a fashion line and my own network and be like a combination of Oprah and Gwen Stefani. And have a perfume. Definitely a perfume.

Twitter is the most amazing medium for a comedy writer. I can't get in every idea I want on the show no matter how hard I try to bully the other writers, so it's a way of me getting out other comic ideas and immediately getting feedback.

What I'd really like to write is a romantic comedy. This is my favorite kind of movie. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity.

Woody Allen is really the ultimate. I love that he believed in himself enough to do what he did. And I have that same feeling - that there's nobody that looks like me in movies, nobody would cast me as a romantic lead, but I want to do it and I feel confident that I can.

When men hear women want a commitment, they think it means commitment to a romantic relationship, but that's not it. It's a commitment to not floating around anymore. I want a guy who is entrenched in his own life. Entrenched is awesome.

You should never have to say hello or goodbye. Even at work sometimes, and I know this is very unpopular, is that if I'm going to work every single day, I don't think you should have to hug people hello every single day when you come to work. I saw you Monday!

I think a lot of writers, male and female, write as if their parents were killed in a car accident when they were 2, and they have no one to hold accountable. And unfortunately, I don't have that. I have parents who I care about what they think.

Anyone who's lost someone to cancer will say this, that you have to struggle to try to remember the person before the diagnosis happened, because they really do change - as anyone would change.

Sometimes I eavesdrop on people. I could rationalize it - oh, this is good anthropological research for characters I'm writing - but it's basically just nosiness. It also helps me gauge where I'm at: Am I normal?

I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world.

I try not to put anything political on the forefront of what I'm trying to do creatively. At the same time, I do think it's wonderful when I hear people say that it's inspirational that I'm an Indian woman on camera. My life is very diverse, and my friends are a diverse group of people.

The funniest racism is the racism between minorities. It's something you don't see dramatized, but almost every minority I know who's my age, they have these funny stories about their parents stereotyping other minorities.

I love talking about clothes with women; it's like a code because women dress for women.

I think as humans, no one remembers their successes, everyone just remembers their failures.

My relationship with my mom is really the single most profound relationship that I've ever had in my life.

I never want to be called the funniest Indian female comedian that exists. I feel like I can go head-to-head with the best white, male comedy writers that are out there. Why would I want to self-categorize myself into a smaller group than I'm able to compete in?

When I was a little kid, I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there, and a mummy. When they were all hassling him, this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them, 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.

When people call me either a girl crush or their best friend, like, the best friend they want, that's, to me, the best compliment anyone could ever give me.

Comedy writers have the most fragile egos.

Fast food is hugely important in the life of a comedy writer. All we do is order in, and what we're going to eat is hotly debated.

I am always surprised at what movie studios think people will want to see. I'm even more surprised at how often they are correct.

I feel like the high-concept shows that have some kind of gimmick tend not to be the hit classic shows of all time.

I have an underdog spirit in me, and now it feels weird to kind of get my own way more often than not.

I have such a rich fantasy life, I can't help it. I do make up a lot of romantic stories in my head.

I just have my characters say my controversial opinions and then hide behind them.

I would love if gay men responded to me. All I want is for many gay men to dress up as me for Halloween.

I'm someone who loves romance. I always have loved it. Most people who grew up as nerds, as I was, surprisingly, have loved romance.

Live performance really terrifies me. I haven't done it, really, in years. I think that's why I retired from my brief career in stand-up.

On 'The Office,' so much of the show is about disguising your true feelings and your romantic feelings because it was a mock documentary.

I don't believe in politics; I don't understand any of it.

I don't like anything permanent; I have to be able to flee. You have to be able to flee at a moment's notice.

I don't listen to the news. I don't read the newspaper unless it's eccentric information - and the obituaries, of course.

I like the brooding man - a brooding man with a sense of humor.

I live in a small world of gouache and brush and pen and ink. I'd like to explore the world of multiples - etching and prints.

I still do have the little lunch bag that my mother made out of a towel and embroidered with my name on it for when I went to kindergarten.

I truly believe there's always a solution to every problem.

If I could never work again and I could just listen to music and walk, I'd be very, very happy.

It's almost impossible to reconcile the realities of how one feels during the day, hour by hour. But I approach things not cynically.

Michael Pollan is a champion. In all ways. A man of great integrity, humor, and common sense and kindness.

My short attention span has allowed me a life of diversity in work and place.

My sister is an artist and an interior designer. She went to high school for art. I went to high school for music.

My workspace is defined by books, ephemera, quiet and light. I don't have a computer, telephone or a fax machine there.

On my desk, I always have a lemon or a lime drying. I love the fragrance. Also, a Staedtler eraser, a brush for the eraser and a pencil sharpener.

The most inspiring objects are books. I have about 5,000 volumes in my home library. It's an unending source of visuals and ideas.

You'd have to be completely crazy not to be influenced by and take from other artists. It's completely impossible not to.

I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning - you know, 'beginning, middle and end.'

I have been working for over 30 years and am always wondering about where I am and where I am going. It does not stop and become a fixed event of achievement.

I like Thomas Jefferson, though he intimidated me. I thought he would have been very tough to be around. I don't know if he had such a sense of humor.

I'm in a complete state of panic before I begin something because I'm sure that it's going to be a complete disaster. I'm going to do a worse job than anybody could ever imagine anybody doing on the planet Earth.

In any work you do, you can be profound one minute, and then you be superficial the next, and you can be smart and insightful and then insipid. There can be room for all that.

It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.

My mother was the influence on me - my father was absent. He was a diamond dealer; he was doing wonderful things in the background, and women were left at home. So my mother really was in charge of everything: the ballet, dance lessons, piano lessons, and latkes.

There is no kind of music I don't listen to. Everything good is interesting. I am as happy with a Bach fugue as I am with a record by Thelonious Monk.