Mindy Kaling Quotes

I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.

Occasionally, some sitcoms still stereotype women - the old dragon or the dolly bird - but on the whole we've moved away from that.

Roles for women need to be better written.

After Nancy Pelosi became Speaker, we were told, 'She's the first female speaker of the House, so whether we like it or not, we've got to handle this with kid gloves. Don't go after Speaker Pelosi. You can go after other people, but you'll be branded as mean and evil if you go after the first female Speaker of the House.'

Every year there's five cop shows, five medical shows and five 'Law & Orders,' but when it's a show about women, they want to pit everyone against each other. I don't think they'd do that if it was a guy show. I think there's room for all of us.

Films about women and their concerns are seen as frivolous, limited and, most damaging of all, niche.

You're allowed to make things for women on television and there's not like... you don't have to go through the humiliation of having made something directed at women. There it's just accepted, whereas if it's a feature, it's like 'So, talk to me about chick flicks.'

But it's hard for a chick to do comedy. It's not as open for them.

Suffice to say, many women find their first appearance on a comedy panel show to be their last. Second chances seem to be given less often to the female of the species.

You know what? At the end of the day, funny is funny. I hope to see the end of all the female cliches that are written in a lot of comedies that are named chick flicks.

Men are rarely questioned on their spouses or their partners, and nor should they be. And the question to ask is why is this done to women?

When a man gets up to speak, people listen then look. When a woman gets up, people kook; then, if they like what they see, they listen.

We didn't used to be so precious about women in comedy back in the old days.

For years, it's driven me crazy that women don't have better roles, especially in comedies. I know so many funny women but I always felt... misogynist streak is too strong a term - but a dismissiveness.

I think women have such rich emotional lives that they are expressive about. I also think they're funny. I like watching strong female characters, and I like writing them. I don't know if it's conscious that I gravitate towards women, but it's certainly evolved that way.

A woman would pitch a joke. Nothing. Then a guy would pitch it and everybody would laugh.

We are still living with a double standard. I know it. Every woman I know knows it, whether you're in the media as a woman, or you're in the professions or business or politics.

If I'm going to be honest about it, I think men get to do this sort of thing all the time. You look at countless performances by great male actors who get to play the whole gamut of human emotions. Women aren't regularly allowed to do that, and I don't know why people are so frightened by it.

Far too often, I read a script where the girls are the girlfriend or the set dressing.

Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all.

I find it extraordinary that contemporary dramatists don't find women interesting. Women are rarely, if ever, the central dramatic engine; they're there as an adjunct, and that hasn't changed at all.

Women are half the population of the world, and yet there are so few female characters on-screen.

It's not very exciting to go to work to just have your character's identity being defined by her relationship with her male counterparts.

I think women are very complicated human beings, and I think there's an oversimplification of women when you see them on screen.

I don't know why women aren't allowed to have the same sort of breadth and scope and flaws of men.