Top 44 Mindy Kaling Quotes

I never want to be called the funniest Indian female comedian that exists. I feel like I can go head-to-head with the best white, male comedy writers that are out there. Why would I want to self-categorize myself into a smaller group than I’m able to compete in?

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. No. We’re in Hollywood trying to be competitive, and get numbers, have our eyes on the Nielsens and things like that.

I have such a rich fantasy life, I can’t help it. I do make up a lot of romantic stories in my head.

Right now, I’m hankering for new adventures… Ninety percent of the time I’m having romantic-comedy fantasies in which I’m wearing little pencil skirts and hurrying down to the subway.

Anybody can have a birthday. It requires nothing. Murderers have birthdays. It’s the opposite of anything that I believe in. And I don’t like at work where you stop everything to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to someone. I feel like that’s for children.

I think as humans, no one remembers their successes, everyone just remembers their failures.

I, like most women, I dress for other women, I think. If I was going to dress for men, I think in general I would be just wearing, like, a fitted black T-shirt and tight jeans every day.

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?

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.

It used to be that you had to make female TV characters perfect so no one would be offended by your ‘portrayal’ of women. Even when I started out on ‘The Office’ eight years ago, we could write our male characters funny and flawed, but not the women. And now, thankfully, it’s completely different.

The overlap in the Venn diagram of things that men hate for women to wear and the things that I love to wear, it’s almost a full overlap on the Venn diagram, which is unfortunate for me.

I have an underdog spirit in me, and now it feels weird to kind of get my own way more often than not.

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.

I love ‘The Office.’ I’m in the premiere, and I’m maybe gonna shoot another episode this season, but I’ve been there since the very beginning, so when I found out this is the last year – I am a good Asian kid who was an A student – I wish I could be there to the end to see things through.

Anyone who’s lost someone to cancer will say this, that you have to struggle to try to remember the person before the diagnosis happened, because they really do change – as anyone would change.

We always think of a diet with a big groan. But I think diets are fun. I think it is an American pastime for a lot of women.

There’s the psychotic ambitious side of myself that wants a fashion line and my own network and be like a combination of Oprah and Gwen Stefani. And have a perfume. Definitely a perfume.

What I’d really like to write is a romantic comedy. This is my favorite kind of movie. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity.

I always knew I wanted kids, but when my mom passed away I was like, ‘I want a bunch of kids. I want three kids or four kids, and I want to have that relationship again.’ I can’t bring my mom back, but I can have children.

Growing up, I remember my parents feeling a little wary of ‘The Simpsons.’ This was the late eighties, and there was a wave of articles about TV shows that were bad for America. Then we all started watching it and loved it.

If I could make a device where people could just intuit everything you are thinking – a little cable you plug into, like, a USB port, I would make a billion dollars.

On ‘The Office,’ so much of the show is about disguising your true feelings and your romantic feelings because it was a mock documentary.

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.

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.

The Tweets that I have written that are most popular are the ones that are the kind of universal girly concerns and observations.

There’s a female writer-performer thing going on in TV right now.

I would love to be married. But it’s not a necessity like the way that I feel I need and want to have children. It would be wonderful to have a husband, and I would feel blessed to do it. But I would feel sad for the rest of my life if I had no kids.

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 really love ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ – and I love the book, too. You wonder how it ever got made into a movie. She’s supposed to be chubby, and two of the hottest guys ever are straight-up fighting over her?

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

I must have been 10 or 11, but anything Dana Carvey ever did, I just really loved. He was on for a long time, I don’t really know when that era was. I could watch Dana Carvey with my parents, they loved him too. They loved all his characters.

People talk about mumblecore but I prefer bumblecore, hyper-realistic bee movies about how bees really are.

I would love if gay men responded to me. All I want is for many gay men to dress up as me for Halloween.

Fast food is hugely important in the life of a comedy writer. All we do is order in, and what we’re going to eat is hotly debated.

Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang – even kids in high school. His short plays were so accessible to younger people and I think that was inspirational to me.

In terms of my Indianness, I try not to rely on it nor deny it. When it comes up organically in my writing, we can address it. About five years ago, we wrote this episode of ‘The Office,’ called ‘Diwali,’ which seemed like an organic way of using it.

People take things at face value on social media. Earnestness is the assumption.

I have a great job writing for ‘The Office,’ but, really, all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I’ll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is, like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.

I’m not good at anything except writing jokes. I wasn’t good at sports, I wasn’t good at anything artsy, ever. I think there was a real worry for a while about what I would be good at. I was just this chubby little Indian kid who looked like a nerd.

I feel lucky because I was a nerd, which I talk about in the book, but I had academic success, so through that, because that’s what my parents put a great deal of value on, I had a great childhood because I sort of fulfilled the expectations of being good at school.

I am always surprised at what movie studios think people will want to see. I’m even more surprised at how often they are correct.

Personally, I, Mindy Kaling want to spend like 80 percent of my life hanging out with women.

I hated L.A. for a long time, and I wanted to leave it. I had these fantasies of going to ‘SNL’ and falling in love with some writer on ‘SNL,’ of getting married and living in New York.

People don’t want to listen to a celebrity tweeting about their charities and shows. That’s why comedy writers do well – we put out little funny ideas.