Quotes from Mindy Kaling

Don't be closer to twice a friend's weight than to her actual weight," I told myself. This little mantra has helped me stave off obesity for more than two decades.

It's sort of my go-to stock image of my childhood, actually. I think it has something to do with knowing I'll never be able to go back to that time that makes me cry every time I listen to it.

Hell is Whole Foods on a Sunday. It's hordes of moms in lightweight fleeces pushing one another out of the way to get to bins of dry lentils.

When we graduated high school, she went to the Cooper Union in Manhattan to pursue her love of set design, and I went to Dartmouth to pursue my love of white people and North Face parkas.

My guest to dinner was my best friend, Jocelyn, who had taken the train down from New York. We forewent seeing any DC museums or national monuments to order cheeseburgers and watch Will & Grace in bed at our hotel, because we are real best friends, not lame fake friends trying to impress each other with how fascinated we are with culture and learning.

Be like Allan Pearl. Sit next to the class clown and study him. Then grow up, take everything you learned, and get paid to be a real-life clown, unlike whatever unexciting thing the actual high school class clown is doing now.

Even though Mavis was my secret friend, she is the only one I hope I see again. She's the only one I wonder about. I hope she wonders about me too.

Bren was the kind of best friend I dreamed about having when I was a little kid. I never knew you could have someone in your life who was pretty much on the same page about essentially everything.

I had placed a lot of faith in Woody Allen's belief that 80 percent of success is just showing up. I said to myself: Are you serious? 80 percent? Sure, I can just show up. Here I am, New York! Give me a job!

So, with my zit throbbing like a nightclub, I went to the interview.

I know a small part of you thinks you could've ended up with Natalie Portman if you had played things a little differently. That's nice. You can have that. That's not hurting anybody.

No pasta. I'm serious. I will climb out of my coffin if anyone brings a baked ziti.

I think that's the lesson of this story: you never know what is going to happen.

Um, Mindy is much less like Elizabeth Bennet than she is a combination of Carrie Bradshaw and Eric Cartman.

I have the opposite of a dry sense of humor, so I'm always impressed by it. My sense of humor is wet and loud and risqué, like topless day at the water park.

IF OUR PHONE CONVERSATION GETS DISCONNECTED, THERE'S NO NEED TO CALL BACK I get it. You get it. We take forever getting off the phone anyway. This was a blessing.

stay in school and be a respectful and hardworking wallflower, and go to an accredited non-online university

I will employ the gentle, vague expression "I'm not crazy about that on you," which should mean to you, "Holy shit, take that off, that looks terrible!" I owe it to you to give feedback like a cattle prod: painful but quick.

The reason I pull Irish exits is not because I think I'm too busy and cool to be bothered with pleasantries. It's that when there is a gathering of more than thirty people I don't want to waste your time with hellos and good-byes. I think it's actually the more polite thing to do, because I'm not coercing partygoers into some big farewell moment with me. Then other people feel like they have to stop what they're doing and hug me, too. It's time-wasting dominoes.

I find it extremely 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.

The truth is, if I were going to lose weight successfully, I would have to think about what I eat constantly. I cannot imagine a life more boring and a more time-consuming obsession than being preoccupied with watching what I eat. I mean, maybe being in a coma would be more boring, but at least then you're free to dream about all of your favorite foods. And the fact of the matter is, I don't have that much brain space to use thinking about it.

I laugh thinking about if they ever tried to do "Who Wore It Best?" for men's magazines. They wouldn't, because no one would care. Men don't care which men looked better in the same clothes because it's so obviously a huge waste of time. It's also why they don't have astrology sections in men's magazines.

Unfortunately, I can't be Tina, because it's very difficult to lure her into a Freaky Friday – type situation where we could switch bodies, even though in the movies they make it look so easy. Believe me, I've tried.

It's one of those songs— like Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven"— that everyone knows all the words to without ever having chosen to learn them.