Top 60 Michael Ian Black Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Your harshest critic is always going to be yourself. Don’t ignore that critic, but don’t give it more attention than it deserves.”

— Michael Ian Black

2. “Perhaps we will end up one of those sad childless couples who spend all their time sleeping late, buying luxury goods, traveling the world, and enjoying each other’s company. That would be terrible.”

— Michael Ian Black

3. “If I revise a children’s book, if I’m spending three hours on the first draft, I’m probably spending 30 minutes revising it. I mean, come on! But to redo a painting? That’s hard work.”

— Michael Ian Black

4. “Sometimes the criticism is actually useful and constructive and actually informs what I do, but most of the time, it’s sort of mindless, or they’re receiving something on a different frequency than I was sending it. They’re just not getting what I’m doing, and that’s fine.”

— Michael Ian Black

5. “Lordy, lordy, lordy do I love money. It is a character flaw, no doubt, one that springs from a panicked childhood in which I always felt as if our family was only a couple missed child support payments from being tossed onto the pitiless streets of our suburban New Jersey town.”

— Michael Ian Black

6. “If you are on the honor roll and your parents don’t put a sticker on their car saying so, they are not proud of you and do not love you.”

— Michael Ian Black

7. “Did my fingering turn you gay? I hope not.”

— Michael Ian Black

8. “The whole idea of punk rock is that you’re dressing yourself in a crazy leather jacket with safety pins and a Mohawk. The idea of being the rebel is a boring societal idea. It’s such a type. And that’s what I was, without knowing it.”

— Michael Ian Black

9. “Things you never thought were going to turn into something end up being the most important things in your life. You have to learn to not try to control it.”

— Michael Ian Black

10. “That’s been my fear all along. That I’m not enough, and I still don’t trust at all that I am.”

— Michael Ian Black

11. “I think people hate me pretty much across the board, which is nice.”

— Michael Ian Black

12. “My absolute favorite growing up was Super Friends. The assemblage of so many mighty heroes in one place was, to me, mind-blowing. It was Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Aquaman, and then sometimes Hawkman and some other, lesser heroes.”

— Michael Ian Black

13. “I take my coffee the same way I take my women: Strong, black, and proud.”

— Michael Ian Black

14. “It doesn’t matter what you’re chasing, when you get there you’re gonna be like, “Oh, is this all? It kind of sucks.””

— Michael Ian Black

15. “The thing that I think is the most important is taking moments to express your appreciation to your partner. A thank you or a quick kiss can go a long way toward affirming your relationship and commitment to each other. That’s not hard to do even when you’re juggling insane careers and three kids.”

— Michael Ian Black

16. “With stand-up, you can be as freeform as you want to be. You can say what you want, how you want, at any moment without constraint.”

— Michael Ian Black

17. “Kids love to be silly, they love to laugh, so I think it was natural for my kids to like the sort of books that I write – and it’s the only kinds of books I’m capable of writing.”

— Michael Ian Black

18. “I don’t chase after things, but I put forward the effort and know the rest of it is out of my hands.”

— Michael Ian Black

19. “I think writing for anybody helps you order your life. It helps you arrange your emotions and your thoughts and it helps to provide perspective.”

— Michael Ian Black

20. “I don’t watch that much comedy. I think it’s professional jealousy. That and a lack of support for my community.”

— Michael Ian Black

21. “My fear is if I expose myself, not so much that I’ll be hurt, but that the reaction will be “Is that all there is? Is that the entirety of you? Because it’s boring.””

— Michael Ian Black

22. “There’s things I know I’m good at, and those things interest me less and less. I learn a lot more from doing it wrong than I do from doing it right.”

— Michael Ian Black

23. “Twitter is about creating whatever persona you want to create and either sticking with it or changing it or evolving it or contradicting it, and I’ve done all that stuff.”

— Michael Ian Black

24. “I thought I’d be living a much more bohemian life and be very poor. I never thought I’d do comedy or be married living in the suburbs. Every time I try to plan my life out it just doesn’t come to pass, and I think that’s a great experience.”

— Michael Ian Black

25. “Super excited about things I’m going to do; never excited about things I’m actually doing.”

— Michael Ian Black

26. “The global business climate is likewhatever, dude.”

— Michael Ian Black

27. “The characters that I have on Twitter have very little resemblance to me, the person who’s writing them.”

— Michael Ian Black

28. “As a game-show host, what I’m thinking and what I’m experiencing doesn’t matter. My opinion doesn’t matter. So there’s a flattened reality to it. It’s fun to do. But it’s certainly not myself in totality – or even maybe a little bit.”

— Michael Ian Black

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29. “All my friends were girls. Then my mom’s strident feminism for years where men were thought of as the enemy, I just didn’t know what the right way to be a man was.”

— Michael Ian Black

30. “If you say “I’m going to be an actor, but I’ll get a teaching degree just in case,” when things get hard, you’ll just be a teacher and that’s how you get stuck.”

— Michael Ian Black

31. “My goal is to work. That’s the goal of most actors or performers: to work and keep working, and do the best you can, and keep growing and changing, trying to improve your craft.”

— Michael Ian Black

32. “Hosting a show, even a talk show or a game show, there’s so much business you have to conduct. There’s so much guiding you have to do.”

— Michael Ian Black

33. “Internet fame is like regular fame only without all the annoying ‘money’ and ‘power.’”

— Michael Ian Black

34. “The things I care about are the most pedestrian things in the world. I care about good ice cream and being a good dad and a decent husband.”

— Michael Ian Black

35. “I’ll never admit that I’m an actor, because the next horrible follow-up question is always, “Oh, what have I seen you in?””

— Michael Ian Black

36. “I am extremely gullible when I lie to myself.”

— Michael Ian Black

37. “I was very surprised how many people were earnestly reminiscing about the ’80s. It’s such a stupid thing to do, like, to be honestly invested in nostalgia. It never even occurred to me to do that.”

— Michael Ian Black

38. “I feel no obligation to teach my readers anything, to impart any sort of wisdom, to teach any sort of lesson, to instill any sort of morality. All I’m trying to do is make them and their parents laugh.”

— Michael Ian Black

39. “By the end of the time I’m writing a book, I’m tearing my hair out and I want to go do stand-up. And then I want to do something else. I don’t know why it is true with me that I can’t just be satisfied doing the one thing, but I’m constantly flitting from one thing to another.”

— Michael Ian Black

40. “I imagine there’s a level of narcissism that goes into thinking you’re enough.”

— Michael Ian Black

41. “I used to need the character but as I’ve gotten older I need it less and less – I prefer to play some version of myself. To approach any acting job as me just being me.”

— Michael Ian Black

42. “The illustrators work so much harder on the books than the writers do. I mean, that’s so much work doing what they do, and it’s terrible for them.”

— Michael Ian Black

43. “Any time I am involved in something from conception to execution, that’s obviously a lot more personal, and I’m going to be more invested in it than something where I just show up for a couple days, shoot, and leave.”

— Michael Ian Black

44. “As an actor, you can show up on a set and be on a TV show for three or four years, or whatever it is and, by the end of it, you just want to do something else.”

— Michael Ian Black

45. “Because hair loss is only superficial when it happens to somebody else.”

— Michael Ian Black

46. “That’s what family is, I guess – finding a place for all the parts of ourselves that fit nowhere else.”

— Michael Ian Black

47. “There is no feeling quite so delicious as that of being virtuous without having had to do anything.”

— Michael Ian Black

48. “I don’t necessarily self-identify as a writer, ’cause it implies a certain level of intelligence.”

— Michael Ian Black

49. “Whatever I write I publish. Because that’s where the money is.”

— Michael Ian Black

50. “My tastes in all things lean towards the arty and boring. I like sports documentaries about Scrabble players, bands that play quiet, unassuming music, and TV shows that win awards. In that way, I am an elitist snob. And proud of it.”

— Michael Ian Black