Mindy Kaling Quotes

My mother is more of an adviser. I followed everything she did when I was younger, because I looked up to her so much.

In psychology (okay, Twilight) they teach you about the notion of imprinting, and I think it applies here. I reverse-imprinted with athleticism. Ours is the great non-love story of my life.

I notice that a little bit at The Office, with, like, an actor: If I decided there'd be a certain way in the script, it would still seem open-ended, whereas ... if I was a man I would not have seen that.

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.

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.

People who are good at stand-up, they sort of seem to have to do it. Something within them makes them have to go on the road.

I've always assumed that my parents and my in-laws would live with me when I get older and have children. I just assume it will happen and that it's the right way to do things. It's a deeply Indian custom - that you kind of inherit your parents and your spouse's parents and you take care of them eventually.

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.'

There is some pressure when you are a woman doing what I do that you must support all other women unconditionally, no matter what they're projecting, or writing, or producing, or putting forth as their art. I think that's equally arbitrary and random and unfair, and kind of sexist. The secretly sexist way. I have really high standards for what I think is funny. I have that for everything, and I think 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.

When you're "East Coast" person, you are so insufferable, and you have no idea. And I was. One, because I was miserable, and nobody liked to be around a miserable person, and two, everything that I thought was so profound, everyone had already dealt with.

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

People talk about mumblecore but I prefer bumblecore, hyper-realistic bee movies about how bees really are.

Albums that remind me of my childhood happiness make me incredibly sad now.

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.

When I was a kid, my parents smartly raised us to keep quiet, be respectful to older people, and generally not question adults all that much. I think that's because they were assuming that 99 percent of the time, we'd be interacting with worthy, smart adults... They didn't ever tell me 'Sometimes you will meet idiots who are technically adults and authority figures. You don't have to do what they say.

There are little Indian girls out there who look up to me, and I never want to belittle the honor of being an inspiration to them. But while I’m talking about why I’m so different, white male show runners get to talk about their art.

I don't want to be skinny. I'm constantly in a state of self-improvement but I don't beat myself up over it.

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 think that it's insidious to be spending more of your time reflecting and talking about panels, and talking more and more in smart ways about your otherness, rather than doing the hard work of your job.

I'm an actor and a writer and a showrunner and I edit my show. ... I have a job that three people usually have, and I have it in one person. And the idea that the critic thought that I had this excess of time for which I could go to, like, panels or write essays was just so laughable to me.

Growing up, I remember my parents feeling a little wary of 'The Simpsons.' This was the late eighties, and there was a wave of articles about TV shows that were bad for America. Then we all started watching it and loved it.

Here's my feeling: For everyone, men and women, it's important to be a feminist. It's important to have female characters. It's wonderful for women to mentor other women, but it's just as important for women to mentor men and vice-versa. In my line of work, having Greg Daniels be such a great mentor to me is fantastic. Finding a writer's assistant, be it a man or a woman, and encouraging them to think with a feminist perspective, is key.

Gratitude is the closest thing to beauty manifested in an emotion

People, you know, had trouble with the character. Mindy is not immediately likeable. She does and says a lot of things that you don't see in, forget female characters, any characters. Like, she says things like, "I'm going to hell because I don't really care about the environment and I love to gossip."

Directing is exhausting, but not for the actual directing part, when you say "Action!" and give creative notes. As a director, the exhausting part is that you are a professional answer-machine.

I think I've always wanted to be a role model, and I think ... everyone should try to live their life like they'd like to be a role model. I think it's like the thing keeping me out of jail.

What I've noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it's so wonderfully fair.

Always Wear Flats and Have Your Friends Sleep Over: A Step-by-Step How-To Guide for Avoiding Getting Murdered

Once I saw Paris Hilton leaving a restaurant in Hollywood and the paparazzi cameras were all over her. It looked so unpleasant. It wasn't because she didn't look sensational - she was that perfect combination of fashionable and slutty - it was because the paparazzi guys were shouting these insanely rude and intrusive questions at her. Like, asking her who she was sleeping with and stuff. I was kind of interested in the answer, so I was glad they asked, but it was still gross.

I think that when you're 5'4" and 150 pounds and you love to chat and you have a blog about shopping, trying to maintain a tiny bit of mystery where you possibly can is not a bad thing.

It doesn't help for you to name a character's first name be Mindy and then be like, "I'm nothing like the character."

Even in my revenge fantasy where all I do is exercise, I can still do only twenty-five pull-ups. Pull-ups are tough, no joke.

I guess when you go to business school you never turn business off.

I really think guys only need two pairs of shoes. A nice pair of black shoes and a pair of Chuck Taylors.

Listen, my body is attracted to your body but when you speak it makes my brain angry.

Writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos.

I'm so much more confident and sexy at thirty-eight than I ever was when I was eighteen or twenty-four.

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

I found it to be smooth sailing - 100 percent smooth sailing my whole career.

Nothing gives you confidence like being a member of a small, weirdly specific, hard-to-find demographic.

People ask me all the time how I got hired onto the Office. Another common question is how do I manage to stay so down-to-earth in the face of such incredible success? ... A third frequently asked question is: "Girl, where you from? Trinidad? Guyana? Dominican Republic? You married? You got kids?" This is mostly asked by guys on the sidewalk selling I LOVE NEW YORK paraphernalia in New York City.

Sarah [Silverman] writes her own jokes. She doesn't just go through her life and talk about everything. She sits down and crafts jokes. Sometimes her inspiration comes from areas of her life that are risqué. But she is an A-plus professional joke-writer in addition to being very attractive and a great performer.

I am an incredibly impatient person.

I have never regretted erring on the side of withholding information.

In high school, I had fun in my academic clubs, watching movies with my girlfriends, learning Latin, having long, protracted, unrequited crushes on older guys who didn’t know me, and yes, hanging out with my family. I liked hanging out with my family! Later, when you’re grown up, you realize you never get to hang out with your family. You pretty much have only eighteen years to spend with them full time, and that’s it.

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.

Haley and I would talk for hours about which member of 'N Sync we'd want to marry. After long deliberation, the answer was always J. C. Chasez. Joey Fatone's last name was going to be “Fat One” no matter how great he was, and even though they didn't know at their age that Lance Bass was gay outright, they sensed he'd make a better good friend and confidante. As for Justin Timberlake, well, JT was the coolest and hottest, but too flashy, so we couldn't trust him to be faithful. J. C. Chasez was the smart compromise.