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.

I always wanted to write, even before I realized that there was a comedy writers' world, or what that life was like. I never thought of myself, at least as a little kid, in terms of being the onscreen talent. I always thought it'd be so much fun to write sketches and be a writer. Even as little as 6 or 7, that's what my main interest was.

I would say that my mother is the single biggest role model in my life, but that term doesn't seem to encompass enough when I use it about her. She was the love of my life.

What Mindy has in common with a lot of women in their mid-30s is that she's obsessed with marriage. It's the entire premise of the 'The Mindy Project'. The pilot is her wanting to get married and her ruining her ex-boyfriend's wedding. For someone who fetishizes marriage so much, we're like, "OK, let's give it to her and let's see if it's as good as she thinks it's going to be." That's been the fun of the beginning part of this season is showing her what the challenges are of being married.

As I've gotten older, I can look at myself more clearly and own the things that I'm good at and work on the things that I'm not. Like, I am not skinny. I know that if I were to lose a little weight I'd literally have more time in the morning because I know clothes would fit better. And now I can look at those things more practically. Instead of being like, "What does that say about me?," now I'm just like, "That would be great to sleep in an extra fifteen minutes because I wasn't trying on everything in my closet."

I guess nothing puts a damper on a one-night stand as much as your friend pointing out all the opportunities where you might have been killed.

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.