Speaking in Hindi has helped me a lot as I can tell my stories with the exact idiom in which they come to me. I think it also helps the audience when I am speaking in a language that is non-elite, so to say, as my stories are also from that perspective.

If you start imagining an audience for yourself, you don’t do justice to the job. You fall into that trap of a self-image."

My set on why I won’t have kids, and especially the mention of how expensive it is to have kids nowadays, always gets a great response."

My only success is that I am alive.

My way of dealing with not really fitting in at my very crappy New England high school and junior high was to write sketch comedy and satirical takedowns of the social hierarchies. At the same time, I was developing a love for movies at the height of the '90s New York indie movie explosion: everything from 'Rushmore' to Nicole Holofcener movies.

It seems to me that humour is everybody's way of keeping sane and standing off from the situations so that they can see it intellectually, as well as emotionally, and I don't know whether you've noticed, but if somebody tells a joke, it's nearly always a mini fantasy.

I think I always wanna write comedy because that's what feels truest to me; it feels closest to life as I know it, so that's what I want to reproduce.

A Swedish newspaper reporter called and said, You've been awarded the Prize. I was quite sure it was a practical joke.