Mindy Kaling

"I was at the movies yesterday, and before the movie started they had this long ad where they were trying to say … "Don't download things illegally" et cetera. And … they were like, "You wouldn't steal a purse, would you? You wouldn't think of stealing a car." And I was thinking about it … and I was like, "You know what? I would steal a car if it was as easy as, like, touching the car, and then 30 seconds later I own the car." And, like, I would steal a car if … [even though I stole] the car, the person who owned the car got to keep the car. And I would also steal a car if no one I had ever met had ever bought a car before in their whole lives."

"When you’re starting out [as a television writer], mostly it’s terrifying because you think you could get fired and then never get hired again. If you see some of the statistics for women of color on writing staffs, you’ll see that even if there’s parity, it’s so hard to get promoted and stay on a show. A whopping majority of upper-level writers are still white men. You see a lot of people of color in the younger ranks, but it’s hard to move up."

"I think there’s been a tendency for people to conflate my characters with my personality. … I wrote 24 episodes of The Office. That’s more than any other person on The Office, but no one can really picture me sitting and doing the hard work of writing the episodes."

"I could really relate to [Never Have I Ever], more than anything else that I’ve ever written. I was personally proud of it, but didn’t know how it would be received. And to this day, I think it’s my biggest success in terms of how many people it reached and how popular it was on Netflix. I learned a lesson from it, which is not to be cynical about the public."

"I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. …. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character."

"I'm going to gently assume that if you're reading this book, you are a little bit of a nerd, or perhaps you're a man whose nerd girlfriend is taking a long time in the bathroom and you can't figure out how to turn on her television."

"I’m surprised when I remember that, physically, I resemble most women in this country. In the United States, a woman who is 5 feet 4 inches and a size 10 is probably more common than virtually any other body type. But somehow when she is on-screen it’s shocking to people, almost as shocking as seeing a married couple on TV where the man and woman are roughly the same age."