“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!”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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!”
– Mindy Kaling
“I have such a rich fantasy life, I can’t help it. I do make up a lot of romantic stories in my head.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“On ‘The Office,’ so much of the show is about disguising your true feelings and your romantic feelings because it was a mock documentary.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“My relationship with my mom is really the single most profound relationship that I’ve ever had in my life.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“People talk about mumblecore but I prefer bumblecore, hyper-realistic bee movies about how bees really are.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“My relationship with my mom is really the single most profound relationship that I’ve ever had in my life.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling
“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.”
– Mindy Kaling