John Hodgman Quotes

Generally speaking, I think it is fair to say that I am a friend to the creatures of the Earth when I am not busy eating them or wearing them.

A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.

Specificity is the soul of narrative.

I am not beautiful, so I don't know why I'm making myself ugly. But the mustache stays.

All I can ask from society is that it please stop telling me why I should like sports.

I actually own a copy of my own book; that's how dedicated I am as an author.

Here's the thing: I am not only a creature of civilization, I'm an asthmatic person. I will only live so long as I have stockpiled the proper inhalers. I'm effectively a cyborg. You know how in Jurassic Park, they bred those dinosaurs with the lysine deficiencies, so if they ever got off the island, they'd die? That's me.

I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to "truthiness." I am also someone who has been trained in deconstruction in the literary theory department of Yale University, so I am someone who is tempted to believe that no absolute truth is possible.

There is no ritual that enhances creativity other than just starting.

My career as a magazine writer was largely prefaced on the idea of curiosity, to go on adventures and weasel my way into the lives of people that I admire.

A literary agent is nothing but a cheap salesman (or woman); while a writer is a cheap salesman (or woman) who also has to actually write the books.

The villain of any story is often the most compelling character.

I say, if you're going to eat a creature alive, you have to expect some screaming. That is the carnivore's burden.

I would definitely make eggs for the rest of my life if I could.

I don't know if you've ever been shoved into the bow of a nutshell pram, a boat that is very easily almost liftable with one hand, and quite tippy, and is being piloted by a 12-year-old, but it is the true feeling of having your life in someone else's hands, and it's very precarious.

My favorite season is autumn, and Maine is lovely for that reason. In Maine, autumn begins on July 29. That's when you start building a fire in the fireplace and the leaves literally start falling from the trees. It is a cold and rugged and a beautiful place that reminds you with its many death traps - its painfully cold oceans, its sharp, jagged beaches, and perilous cliffsides - that nature doesn't care whether you live or die.

I don't really collect anything. I mean, if I see a piece of Moxie soda memorabilia, I'll probably buy it. I'm a sucker for regional soda brands and forgotten histories and that sort of thing.

Just a small-scale cult of personality, maybe raise a geodetic dome out in western Massachusetts and make people wear jumpsuits and give all their possessions to me.

We have all been empowered by the web: everyone with a keyboard can now effectively broadcast to a national audience. In a sense, it puts each of us on the same footing as the major media conglomerates, except for AOL, who now apparently own all our thoughts and teeth.

You know the old saying: "History is written by the winners. And also, the team of hand-picked historians that the winner keeps hidden away in an underground bunker".

I've only ever been mistaken for myself. People draw a lot of comparisons to all of the round-faced, mustached men of entertainment that make me cringe and sick to my stomach about how the world really sees me and they're right.

Everyone feels like they would love to be a really cool bartender in a really cool bar, but you're still surrounded by people who want to destroy themselves with alcohol. When you look at it that way, it's not that much fun.

My type of humor is me not caring whether people know what I'm talking about or not.

John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald meet in hell and team up to assassinate Satan.

Do not listen to the killjoys who tell you never to eat oysters in months that do not contain the letter R: May, June, July, August, Octoba. You know.

I would say aside from Moxie soda bottles and Masonic artifacts, there's nothing I really collect.

I am not a villain.I'm an only-child narcissist monster, but I wish no ill, nor do I wish for world domination; what a hassle that would be!

I believe that by releasing "passing interest/low keepsake-value literature" from the burden of physicality, you are actually releasing the words from their worst liability: the price and inconvenience of actual bookness.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.

I suspect that when the truth ceases to be heartbreakingly funny, we will be in a better place and a happier society over all.

My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.

A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.

Just because you see an iceberg does not mean that there isn't global warming.

My hope when I wrote the first book was that I would get to do it again. But it was not entirely clear that that would happen.

I have learned that newborn infants roll their eyes around and move their heads and their arms in short jerky spasms. And if you homeschool them, they will stay this way forever.

One can always come up with funny lists and jokes. You know what? I take it back. Not everyone can always come up with funny lists and some jokes. I'm very lucky to have a gift where I can do that pretty ably.

All books should be trilogies; I mean I think we all agree on that.

I realized that even in a world of proliferating media venues, online and in print, and on TV and on countless cable channels, the idea that I could be considered an expert on chronic knee pain was I think troubling for society, but very exciting for me.

That which is hard to do is best done bitterly.

Generally speaking, I, like anyone else who does anything publicly, like it when people like what I do, and would like to hear as much.

I am not an Internet superstar.

A lot of media that that I want to consume, I don't want to have to own forever and ever. It's not like real estate.

Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war. If anything, we use war as a metaphor for sports.

I have a lot of cultural references that have amassed in my brain like shrapnel over the years that are meaningful to me.

Borges was unapologetically smart and equally sentimental; a proto-geek, blind to distinctions between low pulp fiction and high criticism, experimental but never arch, and always playful, with a humor as dry as dust.

If you have not seen it, FOOTBALL is a game in which men shove one another back and forth for no reason. They do not choose how, when, or whom they shove. They are doing this in order to please one angry old man on the sidelines. This old man is called the 'coach' or 'yelling surrogate' dad who will never be happy.

Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures, they usually do a pretty good (or pretty awful, but always interesting) job of lying.

First of all, I wish I could grow a beard.

Well, I always had this desire to celebrate and somehow be a part of things that I thought were really great.

People like what they like. They're gonna do what they're gonna do.