Rachel Bloom

All I listened to until age 18 growing up was musical theater. I liked the escapism of it.

I was kind of an unhappy kid. I always felt like a cynical New Yorker trapped in a little kid's body. I started to get some pretty bad anxiety disorders around puberty, which totally did not work with growing up a mile away from the beach. I started cutting my own hair.

The No. 1 thing I am earnestly attracted to is intelligence.

It's double talk and double standards. It's like, be honest, but don't be too honest. Look fresh-faced and young, but don't tell us how you got there. God forbid you have plastic surgery, even though we're telling you, 'Oh, you look old.' Be a career woman, but also, why aren't you having kids? Are you some kind of cold shrew?

Everyone around me was super-cool and laid back and skinny and tan and volleyball-y, and I was just this neurotic kid who was singing 'Annie Get Your Gun.'

I was made fun of a lot in middle school. When I was in seventh grade, the popular kids paid the most popular guy to ask me out.

My standards are based on shows I like, like 'Girls' or 'Arrested Development.' And they're all shows that are groundbreaking. I guess in the back of my head, I think, If you're not being groundbreaking, then what are you doing? If you're not being ballsy and honest and vulgar, then what are you doing?

Jokes that are gratuitously offensive are synonymous with bad writing to me. I'm offended as a writer first and as a person second.

When we're obsessed with someone, it's never about them. It's about us hating ourselves. And that's generally the tone of a lot of my videos, which is this desperate character who's overcompensating with being super happy. But she's broken.

There's so many confusing messages that you're being sent about being pretty but not too pretty, smart but not too smart, ambitious but in a way that makes people comfortable. It's very hard to navigate.

I'm a comedian, and I have my share of anxiety and depression; so do most of my friends. My humor tends to lie in the juxtaposition of extreme lightness - I'm a huge musical-theater fan - and extreme darkness. And so I really like playing with those because that's how I feel.

While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every last person out there isn't dating a writer.