B. J. Novak

I don't actually feel multi-talented. I just feel that I'm in this business where we give ourselves 100 titles and gold statues. It's like, lawyers aren't like, 'You're incredible! You're a professional arguer in front of the judge! You're great at paperwork!' No, you just get credit for one job.

My goal is not to make popular things. My goal is to make the things I love as popular as I can make them.

I like jeans, but I think in 100 years it's going to be crazy when we look back at the fact that everyone, every day for about 60 years straight, wore stiff blue pants as their default. Why?

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.

It feels as though a very disproportionate number of main characters are writers, because that's what the writer knows. Fair enough. But nothing bothers me more in a movie than an actor playing a writer, and you just know he's not a writer. Writers recognize other writers. Ethan Hawke is too hot to be a writer.

I think I am very proud of being associated with quality things. So if I were massively famous for doing massively beloved things, yeah, that sounds great.

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.

I think a lot of writers spend years just getting up the courage to write because it seems like such a fantasy of a profession. My dad saved me all that time by making me think, 'Oh, anyone can be a writer. It's like being a firefighter or a lawyer.'

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.

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

I remember my mum coming into my bedroom when I was lying awake one night, and she asked what I was thinking of... And I was telling her about the inventions I would invent, and she said, 'Can't you ever just think stupid thoughts?'