Mindy kaling Inspirational Quotes

Later, when you're grown up, you realize you never really get to hang out with your family. You pretty much have only eighteen years to spend with them full time, and that's it.

This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink. If you’re reading this book every night for months, something is not right.

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!

If I can muster up any allure in my life, at this stage, I wouldn't mind doing that.

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.

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?

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.

That's what she said.

There's obviously instances where I perceive sexism in my job. ... I think that the sort of sexism that I see has been one that's a little bit like a gentler form of sexism, but still a little bit debilitating, which is that when, as a producer and a writer, whether it was at The Office or [at The Mindy Project], if I make a decision, it'll still seem like it's up for debate.

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.

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.

There is some pressure when you are a woman doing what I do that you must support all other women unconditionally, no matter what they're projecting, or writing, or producing, or putting forth as their art. I think that's equally arbitrary and random and unfair, and kind of sexist. The secretly sexist way. I have really high standards for what I think is funny. I have that for everything, and I think 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.

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.

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 have a personality defect where I sort of refuse to see myself as an underdog... It's because of my parents. They raised me with the entitlement of a tall, blond, white man.

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.

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!

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

There are many teenage vampire books you could have purchased instead. I'm grateful you made this choice.

The chorus of “Jack and Diane” is: Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone. Are you kidding me? The thrill of living was high school? Come on, Mr. Cougar Mellencamp. Get a life.

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

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.

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.

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?

Future hipsters will love me ironically.

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

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!

There are little Indian girls out there who look up to me, and I never want to belittle the honor of being an inspiration to them. But while I’m talking about why I’m so different, white male show runners get to talk about their art. I always get asked, ‘Where do you get your confidence?’ I think people are well meaning, but it’s pretty insulting. Because what it means to me is, ‘You, Mindy Kaling, have all the trappings of a very marginalized person. You’re not skinny, you’re not white, you’re a woman. Why on earth would you feel like you’re worth anything?’

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

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.

I don't want to hear about the endless struggles to keep sex exciting, or the work it takes to plan a date night. I want to hear that you guys watch every episode of The Bachelorette together in secret shame, or that one got the other hooked on Breaking Bad and if either watches it without the other, they're dead meat. I want to see you guys high-five each other like teammates on a recreational softball team you both do for fun.

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

I found it to be smooth sailing - 100 percent smooth sailing my whole career.

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

Even in my revenge fantasy where all I do is exercise, I can still do only twenty-five pull-ups. Pull-ups are tough, no joke.

I think I've always wanted to be a role model, and I think ... everyone should try to live their life like they'd like to be a role model. I think it's like the thing keeping me out of jail.

I'm an A student. I'm addicted to feedback, and I want to please people. That's sort of how I've gotten to where I am.

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

Gratitude is the closest thing to beauty manifested in an emotion

I would say that my mother is the single biggest role model in my life, but that term doesn't seem to encompass enough when I use it about her. She was the love of my life.

When I was a kid, I would always write down lists of my favorite things and keep them in my wallet, just in case someone ever needed to know what my 10 favorite foods were, or my 10 favorite actors.

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

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.

In my mind, the sexiest thing in the world is the feeling that you’re wanted.

Write your own part. It is the only way I've gotten anywhere. It is much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands.

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

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 think as women, you know, if you are considered a pioneer in these things, you can get really distracted by these other things - you know, people's demands of you reflecting on your otherness. And for this white critic to say, "I don't understand why she doesn't do that" - and you're like, "It's because I'm running a show on a major network and I want the show to continue" - and to sort of guilt me.

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

I’ve worked in television for 10 years straight. If I were a man, it wouldn’t be considered strange [to have confidence] at all.

Everyone should try to live their life like they'd like to be a role model.

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'm actually an impatient person. I'm very suited for television because with the process, it's six weeks from the time you come up with an episode until when it airs. We can't drag it out that long. With film, and this is not a profound observation or an original one; it can go on endlessly unless the movie's like incredibly topical. That's the challenge for me, as an impatient person who wants see things come to life. ... I mean, it's just this feeling I get when I see a movie I love.

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

I guess when you go to business school you never turn business off.

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.

I do not think stress is a legitimate topic of conversation, in public anyway. No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn’t conversation. It’ll never lead anywhere. No one is going to say, “Wow, Mindy, you really have it especially bad. I have heard some stories of stress, but this just takes the cake.

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

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.

I have a personality defect where I refuse to see myself as an underdog.

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

I've always had that chip on my shoulder. I've just always been super hard on myself.

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

I've been working in television for so long, since 2004, and I just worked nonstop throughout that time and I've learned so much. I've definitely done that 10,000 hours. I know the format really well and I feel comfortable in it. I'm excited about going into something I'm not so comfortable in, which is film.

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.

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.'

Of course, everyone wants to be mythologized in a great way.

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.

There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.

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.

One friend with whom you have a lot in common is better than three with whom you struggle to find things to talk about.

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.

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.

I think references, where they fit organically, are great. It's great to do a show that's real and relatable, and so much of what is real, is using real things and instances that are specific. Specificity is the best tool you can have, as a writer.

There Has Ceased to Be a Difference Between My Awake Clothes and My Asleep Clothes

Sarah [Silverman] writes her own jokes. She doesn't just go through her life and talk about everything. She sits down and crafts jokes. Sometimes her inspiration comes from areas of her life that are risqué. But she is an A-plus professional joke-writer in addition to being very attractive and a great performer.

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.'

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

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.

I'd rather be like Odysseus than someone who was handed everything.

Sometimes I aid into the confusion by having my character's name be my name.

When I was a kid, my parents smartly raised us to keep quiet, be respectful to older people, and generally not question adults all that much. I think that's because they were assuming that 99 percent of the time, we'd be interacting with worthy, smart adults... They didn't ever tell me 'Sometimes you will meet idiots who are technically adults and authority figures. You don't have to do what they say.

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 didn't completely forget how to be nice or feminine because I have a career.

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.

Here's my feeling: For everyone, men and women, it's important to be a feminist. It's important to have female characters. It's wonderful for women to mentor other women, but it's just as important for women to mentor men and vice-versa. In my line of work, having Greg Daniels be such a great mentor to me is fantastic. Finding a writer's assistant, be it a man or a woman, and encouraging them to think with a feminist perspective, is key.

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.

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.

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.

More than half the questions I am asked are about the politics of the way I look

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

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

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.

Comedy writers have the most fragile egos.

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 feel like I'm in the right profession.

You should know I disagree with a lot of traditional advice. For instance, they say the best revenge is living well. I say it’s acid in the face—who will love them now?

I sort of refuse to be an outsider, even though I know that I very much look like one to a lot of people, and I refuse to view myself in such terms.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

Listen, my body is attracted to your body but when you speak it makes my brain angry.

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

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.

Running is a quick trigger for a good mood. The great thing about endorphins, you don't have to be in great shape to get them.

So I’m into men now, even though they can be frightening. I want a schedule-keeping, waking-up-early, wallet-carrying, non-Velcro-shoe-wearing man.

In high school, I had fun in my academic clubs, watching movies with my girlfriends, learning Latin, having long, protracted, unrequited crushes on older guys who didn’t know me, and yes, hanging out with my family. I liked hanging out with my family! Later, when you’re grown up, you realize you never get to hang out with your family. You pretty much have only eighteen years to spend with them full time, and that’s it.

I'm not into red carpet looks where it's clear the woman wanted to look like a pretty, pretty princess.

I don't consider myself a fashion person, I consider myself a shopping person. As a person who has girlie interests and a little bit of disposable income.

..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.

I have a love/hate relationship with my body, Some days I'm happy with it and other days I wasn't born with Gisele Bundchen's body unfortunately, so you got to work for it - but it's okay.” Madonna “Do I sometimes look at Gisele Bündchen and wonder how awesome life would be if I never had to wear Spanx? Duh, of course. That's kind of the point of Gisele Bündchen.

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

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.

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.

I am an incredibly impatient person.

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!

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?

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

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.