B. J. Novak Quotations

Travel is impossible, but daydreaming about travel is easy.

Different people have different styles, but there is an opportunity as a director to be a writer in every moment, with every visual cue and every piece of production design. Everything is a decision, and everything can be obsessed over.

I wanted to be a writer first, and I struck out in the world to be a writer first, and then found stand-up as a more creative outlet, as a 3D way to be creative.

The most exciting thing I aspire to do is to write something new that I know is going to work, or perform something that I know is going to make people laugh.

The Office' is less a comedy than so many other 'comedies' that have been on the air. It's really about the balance between what is real and what is comic.

Good comics gravitate to each other; you know who's your type of person by watching them onstage, hopefully.

I do not have very much office experience.

There's not many good comedies to watch - you know, comedies that make you glad you watched them.

If people are well paid for reality television and cotton candy and dunking a basketball, why can't they be well paid for changing young minds?

Mindy Kaling gets her own line in the acknowledgments, as previously negotiated by her representatives. Thanks, Mindy. I love you and you're the best.

I'm a believer in trusting the director.

Nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end.

Perfect. Why was this so hard to find?”The other type of perfect is the type you never could have expected and then could never replicate.

I think it's better to not know certain things. It gives the world an extra bit of mystery, which is important to us as human beings.

Regret is just perfectionism plus time.

There's always going to be one more thing. Because that's what infinite feels like. And the difference between love and everything else is that it's infinite, it's built out of something infinite, or it feels like it is, anyway, which is the same thing to us. You think a million billion more things will come your way, a million billion more versions of everything. But no, everything that actually causes that infinite feeling, the circumstances of every infinite feeling, is so, so finite.

It's not always enough to be brave, I realized years later. You have to be brave and contribute something positive, too. Brave on its own is just a party trick.

Battered Women: sounds delicious. Doesn’t make it right.

If you love something, let it go. If you don't love something, definitely let it go. Basically, just drop everything, who cares.