Mindy Kaling quotes:

When I was a little kid, I wrote this play about all these characters living in a haunted house. There was a witch who lived there, and a mummy. When they were all hassling him, this guy who bought the house - I can't believe I remember this - he said to them, 'Who's paying the mortgage on this haunted house?' I thought that was really funny.

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.

I fall into that nebulous, quote-unquote, normal American woman size that legions of fashion stylists detest. For the record, I'm a size 8 - this week, anyway. Many stylists hate that size because I think to them, it shows that I lack the discipline to be an ascetic; or the confident, sassy abandon to be a total fatty hedonist.

The funniest racism is the racism between minorities. It's something you don't see dramatized, but almost every minority I know who's my age, they have these funny stories about their parents stereotyping other minorities.

I've always assumed that my parents and my in-laws would live with me when I get older and have children. I just assume it will happen and that it's the right way to do things. It's a deeply Indian custom - that you kind of inherit your parents and your spouse's parents and you take care of them eventually.

I had these kind of unrealistic expectations that were fueled by romantic comedies, and it has both helped me and hurt me in many ways. It helped me because, in general, they've made me hopeful. I just figure things will eventually work out for me. But nobody is like any Tom Hanks character. Nobody is Hugh Grant. No one is Meg Ryan!

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, 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.

When people call me either a girl crush or their best friend, like, the best friend they want, that's, to me, the best compliment anyone could ever give me.

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.

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.

You should never have to say hello or goodbye. Even at work sometimes, and I know this is very unpopular, is that if I'm going to work every single day, I don't think you should have to hug people hello every single day when you come to work. I saw you Monday!

I want a schedule-keeping, waking-up-early, wallet-carrying, picture-hanging man. I don't care if he takes prescription drugs for cholesterol or hair loss.

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.

I was always a silent comedy nerd. I would stay up late and sneak downstairs to watch 'Saturday Night Live' and 'Kids in the Hall,' and things like that. Very early on, my parents realized that I was not going to be an engineer or a doctor. I just don't have those inclinations, at all.

As a kid, I always loved serialized books. It's the reason why people love 'Harry Potter.' Serialization is amazing. It works in television. It works in film and it works in books. Especially when you're a young kid, you get attached to these characters.

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.

I feel like if I had my personality but was an OB/GYN, you would be psyched. You'd be like, 'My chatty, pop-culture-interested but plainspoken, wants-to-talk-about-clothes but serious-minded doctor.' I feel like I would clean up with patients. That's kind of a cocky thing to say.

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 try not to put anything political on the forefront of what I'm trying to do creatively. At the same time, I do think it's wonderful when I hear people say that it's inspirational that I'm an Indian woman on camera. My life is very diverse, and my friends are a diverse group of people.

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.

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.

I love talking about clothes with women; it's like a code because women dress for women.

My relationship with my mom is really the single most profound relationship that I've ever had in my life.

I went to Dartmouth College so simply by being an Indian-American woman, I was already so statistically interesting. And then the fact that I didn't want to do anything science-related, and I wanted to write comedy plays and act little bit - I mean, I became deeply interesting in college because of how rare that was.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I was obsessed with being popular in high school and never achieved it. There's photos from our high school musicals, and I'm comically in the deep background, wearing a beggar's costume.

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 feel like the high-concept shows that have some kind of gimmick tend not to be the hit classic shows of all time.

I love that 'Much Ado About Nothing,' passionate, smart fighting. I love fighting with guys, and that's something that I don't get to see: arguing at a high level with a member of the opposite sex. That didn't really happen that much on 'The Office.' I just like that 'Moonlighting,' Benedick-Beatrice type of thing.

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?

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

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.

In my entire life, I never once heard either of my parents say they were stressed. That was just not a phrase I grew up being allowed to say. That, and the concept of Me time.

I am slightly offended by the way busy working women my age are presented in film. I'm not, like, always barking orders into my hands-free phone device and telling people constantly, I have no time for this! I didn't completely forget how to be nice and feminine because I have a career.

That's the one nice thing about being a dork about men: you can sometimes play it off as restrained and classy."

With no music to listen to, I just biked around in circles talking to myself like a kid on the cover of a Robert Cormier young adult novel, circling around puzzled Jewish families walking back to their cars. This is how I learned to ride a bike."

As a kid it's adorable to have a gap in your teeth. But then, because of the shifting in my mouth, I started whistling through it, and as a 32-year-old woman, whistling while you speak in sort of annoying.

The Internet also makes it extraordinarily difficult for me to focus. One small break to look up exactly how almond milk is made, and four hours later I'm reading about the Donner Party and texting all my friends: DID YOU GUYS KNOW ABOUT THE DONNER PARTY AND HOW MESSED UP THAT WAS? TEXT ME BACK SO WE CAN TALK ABOUT IT!

When I was twenty-five, I went on exactly four dates with a much older guy whom I'll call Peter Parker. I'm calling him Peter Parker because the actual guy's name was also alliterative, and because, well, it's my book and I'll name a guy I dated after Spider-Man's alter ego if I want to.

Writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos.

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.

In junior high, there were a lot of really ugly guys who were popular because they made people laugh. I was like, "Wow, comedy is the great freer of hideous people." It was an incredibly liberating thing. If you ask a girl, "What do you want in a guy?" 99 percent are like, "I just want him to be funny." I thought, "If that applies to women, I'm set.

I know a lot of people think of me and they like, oh that girl is really sexy, that girl is really put together, she would never do something as unladylike as a beet eating competition.

I don't want to be skinny. I'm constantly in a state of self-improvement, but I don't beat myself up over it.

I think a lot of writers, male and female, write as if their parents were killed in a car accident when they were 2, and they have no one to hold accountable. And unfortunately, I don't have that. I have parents who I care about what they think.

Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines.

I have the right to life, liberty and chicken wings.

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."

I really think guys only need two pairs of shoes. A nice pair of black shoes and a pair of Chuck Taylors.

Colored leather is my favorite. To me, there's nothing more fun than wearing a cobalt blue leather skirt or a fuchsia leather jacket.

I'm a smart enough person to know that I don't want everyone to be cookie-cutter versions of the nine guys who wear Converse sneakers.

I'm not overweight. I flucuate between chubby and curvy.

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.

I kind of killed it in college. You know that saying "big fish in a small pond"? At Dartmouth college, I was freakin' Jaws in a community swimming pool

I'm not married, I frequently use my debit card to buy things that cost less than three dollars, and my bedroom is so untidy it looks like vandals ransacked the Anthropologie sale section. I'm kind of a mess.

Nothing gives you confidence like being a member of a small, weirdly specific, hard-to-find demographic.

My dad is a very snappy dresser; he gets all his stuff tailored. He's an architect, so he's a little more artistically minded.

I have never regretted erring on the side of withholding information.

I think a lot of people compare female writers or female comedians to each other in a way that men are not. Male comedy writers are not scrutinized.

In my writers' room, which is mostly men, I get a lot of questions like "What would be the quickest way to pass as a seemingly normal guy between the ages of twenty-five and forty years old?"

Sometimes you just have to put on lip gloss and pretend to be psyched.

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?

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.

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

If you are going to ask your crush for their phone number, you are one of the small group of women I am so jealous of.

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.

I'm the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really high and watch them get dashed to pieces than wisely keep my expectations at bay and hope they are exceeded. This quality has made me a needy and theatrical friend, but has given me a spectacularly dramatic emotional life.

I have crushes on celebrities or people I meet or see in the coffee shop, and every day I fall in love with three people simply because they said one funny thing or appeared to me in a certain way.

Truthfully, I guess I would like to be remembered as a great writer and a kind person. I wouldn't mind if an expensive bag were named after me, like Jane Birkin.

It makes me cry because it means that fewer and fewer people are believing it's cool to want what I want, which is to be married and have kids and love each other in a monogamous, long-lasting relationship.

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?

My mom always used to say, "You can't say I love you before you can say I." And I think that sort of makes sense.

My dad's whole family is in Madras and I was born in America so we didn't have that big Indian community. I don't really have anything interesting to say about it. When I talk about it people are like, 'meh, let's talk about something else.'

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 stupidly memorize my credit card and use it about thrice weekly for online shopping. The only reason I don't bankrupt myself is that I return about 75% of what I buy.

I have a whole system down for returning online shopping: a tape gun, a printer for return labels. That has replaced traditional window shopping in my life, as I've gotten busier.

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.

I would rather have someone read my diary than look at my iPod playlists.

It's really sweet when people tweet at me and say I'm their spirit animal or 'I wish she was my best friend,' which is the nicest compliment. For me, it's like, doing television is so personal because you're in people's homes, so the fact that people feel that way means so much to me.

There is this cliche of, "Oh, your professional life is fine, but your romantic life isn't." But, that's also really true of me and all my friends. You don't want to not do something that's relatable simply because you're worried that it might be cliche.

What? I have a cold. Don't get a look of terror on your face. The worst that could happen is that you'll get a cold, too. You don't have to theatrically Purell a thousand times a day and look all panicky every time I come into the room.

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.

I think when men hear that 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 anywhere. I want a guy who is entrenched in his own life.

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.

I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world.

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

There are so many distractions you can face as a woman, either with relationships or worrying about, Should I go to this party? or, Should I be doing this to help me get ahead? All [success] is, is doing your work and staying focused. It's boring advice, but boring good advice is what you can get from me!

If I gave my mother a knitted scarf she'd be worried I was wasting my time doing stupid stuff like knitting instead of school work. Presenting a homemade knitted object to my parents was actually like handing them a detailed backlog of my idleness.

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

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.

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.'

Live performance really terrifies me. I haven't done it, really, in years. I think that's why I retired from my brief career in stand-up.

I'm someone who loves romance. I always have loved it. Most people who grew up as nerds, as I was, surprisingly, have loved romance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Twitter is the most amazing medium for a comedy writer. I can't get in every idea I want on the show no matter how hard I try to bully the other writers, so it's a way of me getting out other comic ideas and immediately getting feedback.

"Why is everyone trying to tell me that when you get older it gets better?" I didn't believe it, because I'm so contrarian and suspicious of everything. And then to find that it's kind of true is nice.

..I find it incredible impossible not to cry when I hear Stevie Nicks's "Landslide," especially the lyric: "I've been afraid of changing, because I've built my life around you." I think a good test to see if a human is actually a robot/android/cylon is to have them listen to this song lyric and study their reaction. If they don't cry, you should stab them through the heart. You will find a fusebox.

[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.

A remarkable thing about me is that the time that elapses between a sad thought and a flood of tears is three or four seconds.

Albums that remind me of my childhood happiness make me incredibly sad now.

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.

Always Wear Flats and Have Your Friends Sleep Over: A Step-by-Step How-To Guide for Avoiding Getting Murdered

Another old saying is that revenge is a dish best served cold. But it feels best served piping hot, straight out of the oven of outrage. My opinion? Take care of revenge right away.

As I've gotten older, I can look at myself more clearly and own the things that I'm good at and work on the things that I'm not. Like, I am not skinny. I know that if I were to lose a little weight I'd literally have more time in the morning because I know clothes would fit better. And now I can look at those things more practically. Instead of being like, "What does that say about me?," now I'm just like, "That would be great to sleep in an extra fifteen minutes because I wasn't trying on everything in my closet."

As my mom has said, when one person is unhappy, it usually means two people are unhappy but that one has not come to terms with it yet.