Mindy Kaling Quotes

Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. 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.

I had to learn a skill set. I think I had the materials to be a good comedy writer.

I say if you love something, set it in a small cage and pester and smother it with love until it either loves you back or dies.

Everyone has a moment when they discover they love Amy Poehler.

If I’m at a party where I’m not enjoying myself, I will put some cookies in my jacket pocket and leave without saying good-bye.

People seem to be having these awesome sex lives and I'm just trying to find a life partner to go apple picking with. What's wrong with me?

Why didn’t you talk about whether women are funny or not? I just felt that by commenting on that in any real way, it would be tacit approval of it as a legitimate debate, which it isn’t.

I feel the same way about clothes as I do about food. I want everything.

I just have my characters say my controversial opinions and then hide behind them.

Sometimes I eavesdrop on people. I could rationalize it - oh, this is good anthropological research for characters I'm writing - but it's basically just nosiness. It also helps me gauge where I'm at: Am I normal?

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.

You always want to keep your look clean and elegant, but you don't have to do the safe black-dress route. Have some fun! Wear something colorful with a hint of sparkle.

When men hear women want a commitment, they think it means commitment to a romantic relationship, but that's not it. It's a commitment to not floating around anymore. I want a guy who is entrenched in his own life. Entrenched is awesome.

Also, chubby people can never truly pull off ethereal the same way skinny people can never be jolly.

I don't have very much time to surf the net, because it's as though my boss has a tracking device on me. The instant I'm looking at a Chloe sweater on Shopbop, I'll get a call in my office with a PA asking: "Paul wants to know where you are and why you're not in the writers room, and if maybe you're online shopping."

It'd be great to be so famous that if I murder someone, I will never, ever, ever serve any jail time, even if it's totally obvious to everyone that I did it.

Best friend isn't a person, it's a tier.

[Being role model ]is good for me mentally, selfishly, and it's also nice to try to do that for, especially, younger women. I mean, it's scary as hell. ... I worry about it, but I think it's a good thing to try to do.

Not to be weird, but I still have an ongoing relationship with my mom, even though she passed away, and I've been surprised at how much I've been able to convey to her. Now I sound like a total weirdo, but that's true.

Bribes and boy bands. That’s all you need to be a babysitter.

There are time when friends have said they hooked up with someone and all it means is that they had a highly anticipated kissing session. Other times it's a full-on all-night sex-a-thon. Can't we have a universal understanding of the term, once and for all? From now on, let's all agree that hooking up = sex. Everything else is 'made out.' And if you're older than twenty-eight, then just kissing someone doesn't count for crap and is not even worth mentioning. Unless you're Mormon, in which case you're going to hell.

If I'm going to be a mess, I might as well be a hot mess, right?

Looking back six years ago when I had just come from 'The Office' to 'The Mindy Project' and what I was trying to say back then. I feel like we don't revisit our younger idealistic selves, you just get in this pattern of churning these episodes out. Now I was like, "Let's try and get in my mind back then," because my life personally has changed so much, too. I just thought, "What was I trying to say? And now can I make it look like it was all part of one larger story."

Skinny foodie, get away from me.

Why is everyone trying to tell me that when you get older it gets better?

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.

My parents were supportive of my creativity but did not have a lot of patience for whimsy with zero production value. They had stuff to do.

When I was growing up, I didn't do plays in downtown Boston, and my parents weren't putting me in auditions. They never thought, Oh, she has a gift! They never thought of me as an entertainer when I was a young kid.

Why wear white? It's like, forget about dropping something on it. I don't understand how anybody wears white.