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’m not complaining about Romance Being Dead - I’ve just described a happy marriage as based on talking about plants and a canceled Ray Romano show and drinking milkshakes: not exactly rose petals and gazing into each other’s eyes at the top of the Empire State Building or whatever. I’m pretty sure my parents have gazed into each other’s eyes maybe once, and that was so my mom could put eyedrops in my dad’s eyes.

My version of an Irish exit has an air of deception to it, because it includes my asking loudly, “Where’s the bathroom?” and making theatrical looking-around gestures like a lost foreign tourist. But then, instead of finding the bathroom, I sneakily grab my coat and leave.

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.

My dream of course, as a writer and a person who's an entertainer, is: Grow up to be Mindy Kaling, don't grow up to be Mindy Lahiri.

Couples are really funny, because if they are together, they can fight and do fun things together. In Jane Austen books, marriage is the end of the story, but I actually think a really funny couple could be a fun thing to watch.

I once heard that Quentin Tarantino, who I obviously love and think is a genius, says that there's no such thing as guilty pleasure, there's only pleasures. And I do love that idea, because I do think that there's a pretentiousness when people make a list of their favorite things. I like to live a life where I don't think of my pleasures as guilty pleasures.