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.

All I want to do is be a gay icon. I was reading Lady Gaga's twitter, because she has like 12 million followers, or something like that. I feel like she has fans, gay, straight, bi, who would throw themselves off a building for her.

Twitter is so short, it's safe. I don't want my bosses to be like, 'Hey, your script is due and we saw you wrote four blog pages.'

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.

Gratitude is the closest thing to beauty manifested in an emotion

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.

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.