Mindy Kaling Quotes

There's no question that you can explore aspects of yourself through roles that you play, and you get a chance to investigate yourself; that's healthy, and it's therapeutic in a way. But if you're indulging yourself, exploration at the cost of the story or the project, that's not good.

People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing.

The thing is, about a character, it's not about being right, it's about the truth. The truth comes from within, so you have to search as an artist for the truth.

I do this acting thing mostly for myself. I like to make a connection and communicate with the audience to make myself feel less lonely. I also do it to develop my own character, so sometimes I do it to just be away in a certain area that I've never been to. But mostly, the story has to do something for me.

When I was involved with 'Star Wars,' I was very interested in all the backstories, and I used to pepper George with all kinds of questions about anything that crossed my mind, because I was very, very into it. But when the job came to an end, I had to move on.

I always get inspiration from whatever characters say about my character.

Every movie I make teaches me something. That's why I keep making them.

That's the whole point of writing to me - I put my characters under incredible duress, and from that comes their truth. In a way, I'm using them to try to find my own answers in life.

As an actor, I don't really think you find yourself. I mean, once you find yourself, I think it becomes boring and you become set in your ways. I think, as an actor I think it's not a bad thing but more of a gift. It's something you're always doing as an actor. You're adjusting constantly.

I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work, and it creates this strange connection.

I came to filmmaking as an actor looking for great characters and great opportunities, both of which are kind of hard to come by. It turns out I really love the process. And, it's exciting to be able to take my career by the reigns and make things happen for myself. Hopefully, in doing so, more opportunities will become available to me.

I think it's natural for an artist to explore as they evolve.

But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.

I don't look at my films or my old drawings much, so that was an interesting way to kind of reconnect with myself a bit.

I spent 12 years doing different things in film trying to figure out the story I wanted to tell.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

I absolutely loved my time at 'Brothers & Sisters,' what I learned and everything that went with it. It was an incredibly formative time for me.

Then I came in twice a week - for my own enjoyment as well as to be a guide. And then we started to apply some of the splinters of the ideas back into the piece.

I feel like I go through cycles as an actress.

Each film I make changes me in some way. When I start the picture I'm one person and by the time I finish I'm another.

Almost any film that you do is an opportunity to open you up and make you more aware of an area that you might not be thinking about. That's what is kind of cool, or one of the cool things about this profession.

I want to keep an element of myself in every character I play. And maybe that's connected to finding something that you like in every character. Maybe they coincide.

With 'Letters from Iwo Jima,' then 'Memories of Tomorrow,' I reached a sort of turning point in my acting. I had poured so much of myself into those movies that I really had no idea where to go from there.

I know that some people work differently, but I have to work from the inside out. It doesn't matter how big the character is, there has to be a truthful core.

This black hole that people talk about in my career in the '70s, when I didn't make any films - in retrospect, what I was doing was learning my job.