Michael Ian Black Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

I loved Dungeons & Dragons. Actually, not so much the actual playing as the creation of characters and the opportunity to roll twenty-sided dice. I loved those pouches of dice Dungeon Masters would trundle around, loved choosing what I was going to be: warrior, wizard, dwarf, thief.

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."

There is no word for feeling nostalgic about the future, but that's what a parent's tears often are, a nostalgia for something that has not yet occurred. They are the pain of hope, the helplessness of hope, and finally, the surrender to hope.

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

I imagine there's a level of narcissism that goes into thinking you're enough.

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.

My process is surprisingly straightforward. I find myself with little to do over a stretch of time and I say, "I should write children's books today." Then I sit down and write a children's book, and if it takes more than, realistically, three hours, I feel like I've done something wrong.

I don't really read children's books or deal with children's books, so I don't have any relationship with them other than my own.

You can't write a children's book that takes more than five or six minutes to read, because it will drive the parents batty. It has to be compact. Nobody thinks about the parents when they write these stupid books. I could write longer children's books, but it would actually be bad if I did.

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.

Part of what's exciting to me about my career is the constant looking forward. Whenever I finish one project, I am looking to what's next.

I'm not sure what it would mean to have "made it." Made what? Yes, I can make a decent living in show business, so if that's the criteria, then I've made it. But that doesn't feel that important to me. The stuff that matters to me are the new challenges. I know that sounds hokey, but it's true.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think in doing stand-up there are no rules and there's no architecture.

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.

Hosting a game show is so bizarre and uniquely its own thing. Anytime I'm hosting something, I try to bring as much of myself to it as I can, but it's always going to be incomplete.

I probably should be thinking of better ideas on how to promote myself, but I don't really spend a lot of time doing it. I really don't know how to promote effectively.