Because confidence is like respect; you have to earn it.

My dad is funny in his own way, and so is my brother, but in terms of legitimately making a lot of people laugh, that's my mom. I inherit my sense of comedy from her.

Running is a quick trigger for a good mood. The great thing about endorphins, you don't have to be in great shape to get them.

Maybe the point is that any marriage is work, but you may as well pick work that you like.

There wasn't a big tradition of comedy at Dartmouth. More than that, there wasn't really anything artsy going on in Hanover, or even in New Hampshire. The cool thing about the school is that there's nothing for people to watch, so if you were to do a play or a sketch or an improv troupe, it was always packed. There's nowhere else for anyone to go. But there was no comedy.

When you only do 10 episodes for a final season, every character and all of her interactions in every storyline have so much more import because it's the last time we're going to do it. It's been really helpful saying, "OK, where do we want each of these characters to end?" We have 10 episodes to do it and working backward from that, I kind of envy my friends who have always been on a cable network because this is really that great benefit of doing it this way.

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.