Top 35 B. J. Novak Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you love something, let it go. If you don’t love something, definitely let it go. Basically, just drop everything, who cares.”

— B. J. Novak

2. “Regret is just perfectionism plus time.”

— B. J. Novak

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

— B. J. Novak

4. “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.”

— B. J. Novak

5. “And anyone will tell you that’s the whole point. You want to meet someone who likes the same things you do, and who likes you most when you’re most being yourself.”

— B. J. Novak

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

— B. J. Novak

7. “Travel is impossible, but daydreaming about travel is easy.”

— B. J. Novak

8. “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.”

— B. J. Novak

9. “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.”

— B. J. Novak

10. “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?”

— B. J. Novak

11. “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.”

— B. J. Novak

12. “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.”

— B. J. Novak

13. “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.”

— B. J. Novak

14. “I’m a believer in trusting the director.”

— B. J. Novak

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

— B. J. Novak

16. “I do not have very much office experience.”

— B. J. Novak

17. “There’s not many good comedies to watch – you know, comedies that make you glad you watched them.”

— B. J. Novak

18. “CHILD: “Why does carrot cake have the best icing?” MOTHER: “Because it needs the best icing.”

— B. J. Novak

19. “I was sad that summer was over. But I was happy that it was over for my enemies, too.”

— B. J. Novak

20. “But no matter what their friends told them, they would always know what really happened. They just kept driving faster, and outran the rain.”

— B. J. Novak

21. “The Battle Creek, Michigan, headquarters of Kellogg’s looks like a spaceship built to look like a pyramid that was then hastily converted into a public library during a period of intergalactic peace.”

— B. J. Novak

22. “CHILD: “Why does carrot cake have the best icing?” MOTHER: “Because it needs the best icing.” Quantum Nonlocality and the Death of Elvis Presley You may remember.”

— B. J. Novak

23. “It feels like the world is made of music, and you are the world.”

— B. J. Novak

24. “The cute one?” “No, the other cute one.” “Oh, she’s cute too.”

— B. J. Novak

25. “The harm, besides those hours that actually do matter when you barely have one night off every couple of weeks, is the little mark you get on you every time you open up a door to a hope and then close it fast in disappointment. It leaves a nick, or a dent, and those nicks and dents are not invisible. I used to see them all the time.”

— B. J. Novak

26. “He started writing poetry again, but it didn’t come as easily. It was hard now to get past the self-consciousness – the silliness, really – of being such a well-established adult applying himself, seriously, to such a youthful joy.”

— B. J. Novak

27. “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.”

— B. J. Novak

28. “Everything helped a little bit, at first; but nothing really helped.”

— B. J. Novak

29. “What needed to stop was the succession of dates with these relatively impressive, relatively interesting people, when I could tell from the first minute that everyone here was going to end as a runner-up in a long race to nowhere in particular, broken-down, exhausted, no one wearing a medal.”

— B. J. Novak

30. “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.”

— B. J. Novak

31. “Is it just that everything came too easy? Because if you’re romanticizing ‘difficult’... you’re going to get over that quickly, I promise you. I promise you. Everyone forgets how difficult ‘difficult’ really is.”

— B. J. Novak

32. “He kissed her for an eternity, which was fine, because heaven had eternities to burn. Then he kissed her for another.”

— B. J. Novak

33. “You have infinite time here, and there are infinite things to do, but you still don’t end up doing much of it. You do what you love most, over and over.”

— B. J. Novak

34. “We talked for four hours. I don’t remember most of it, but often a little moment in an unrelated conversation or alone on the street will trigger a memory of it I didn’t know I had. So I know it’s all there somewhere.”

— B. J. Novak

35. “All eyes are beautiful, I said, which is why it’s such an easy compliment.”

— B. J. Novak

36. “You meet a finite number of people in your life. It feels to you like it’s infinite, but it’s not. I think it’s the biggest thing I can see that you can’t.”

— B. J. Novak

37. “Do you think why not is ultimately a better question than why? Why or why not?”

— B. J. Novak

38. “I opened up a bit and explained that I have a type I’m drawn to naturally, but that I’ve found that the women I’ve ended up loving the most have never been what I’ve thought of as my type, maybe because part of love is being helpless, being out of control of your own emotions.”

— B. J. Novak