Mindy Kaling Quotes

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.

Gratitude is the closest thing to beauty manifested in an emotion

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel like I'm in the right profession.

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

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

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'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.

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

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

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?’

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

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.

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.