John Hodgman quotes
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“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.”
-- John Hodgman -
“When a good friend gives you his or her book, you don't want to read it, because you're afraid that it's not going be what you hope it can be.”
-- John Hodgman -
“My type of humor is me not caring whether people know what I'm talking about or not.”
-- John Hodgman -
“Writing for me always requires trickery. Tricking myself into sitting down, letting words tumble out until you find the good ones. t's sort of a trance. And when a piece is done, I have little memory of how I wrote it, and zero confidence I'd ever be able to do it again.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.”
-- John HodgmanSource : John Hodgman (2012). “More Information Than You Require”, p.268, Penguin
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“As you know, the thing that I know the least about is the topic of sports.”
-- John Hodgman -
“Creating fake facts does require a measure of haphazard research, insofar as they need to not just be possible, but also interesting.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it.”
-- John Hodgman -
“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.”
-- John Hodgman -
“Hosting a TV show is a full-time job in which success is defined by it never ending.”
-- John Hodgman -
“I actually own a copy of my own book; that's how dedicated I am as an author.”
-- John HodgmanSource : "John Hodgman, part one: the global superpocalypse". Interview with Scott Tobias, www.avclub.com. November 8, 2011.
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“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.”
-- John Hodgman -
“Any time you try to create an Internet meme, automatic fail. That's like the worst thing you can do.”
-- John Hodgman -
“All I can ask from society is that it please stop telling me why I should like sports.”
-- John HodgmanSource : "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.
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“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.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“First of all, I wish I could grow a beard.”
-- John Hodgman -
“The villain of any story is often the most compelling character.”
-- John Hodgman -
“What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum! That's an amusing relic of our past.”
-- John Hodgman -
“When you think about it, the end of the world is a little bit like death: We all know it's going to come eventually, and as we get older, we feel we see the signs more and more distinctly.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“Comedy does offer an avenue to television and film careers for untelegenic people that great drama does not.”
-- John Hodgman -
“A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.”
-- John HodgmanSource : "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.
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“All books should be trilogies; I mean I think we all agree on that.”
-- John Hodgman -
“Specificity is the soul of narrative.”
-- John HodgmanSource : John Hodgman (2017). “Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches”, p.58, Penguin
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“Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.”
-- John Hodgman -
“Tonally, there was no discussion; I just don’t know any other way to do it. I don’t want to make people feel bad, and I don’t want to make their problems into a joke. I do love telling people when they’re right and wrong, but for the most part, it was always going to be about real fights where people have a real difference of opinion and a real dispute. I want to make jokes, but I also want to make a decision that is fair.”
-- John Hodgman -
“This is not to say there are not Chicagoans. But I would suggest that they are a nomadic people, whose lost home exists only in their minds, and in the glowing crystal memory cells they all carry in the palms of their hands: a great idea of a second city, lit with life and love, reasonable drink prices at cool bars, and, of course, blocks and blocks of bright and devastating fire.”
-- John Hodgman -
“This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind.”
-- John Hodgman -
“I know electric knives are excellent for carving turkeys that have had their bones removed and been forced into a mold to shape them. Please note that those turkeys are called hams.”
-- John Hodgman -
“I think there are very few invisible musical instrument players out there who can claim the chops and sheer perseverance of Björn Türoque, the world's perennial second-place air guitar champion. Whoever this Dan Crane might be, he's captured the mad, seductive spirit of the arbitrary skill contest perfectly, and rocks it hard into the hot Finnish night. There is no number of umlauts that do this Jekyll and Hyde of air-rocking justice.”
-- John Hodgman -
“Even in my own life, there are memories I have that are difficult to explain - happenings that are so odd and unaccountably weird, that it is difficult to imagine they were not the result of prolonged and frequent contact with aliens throughout my life.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“There is no ritual that enhances creativity other than just starting.”
-- John Hodgman -
“Comics have a problem, and that is continuity - the obsession with placing the characters in an existing world, where every event is marked in canon. You're supposed to believe that these weepy star boys of now are the same gung-ho super teens fighting space monsters in the '60s, and they've only aged perhaps five years.”
-- John Hodgman -
“I would be good for maybe not the center square but an upper square on 'Hollywood Squares.'”
-- John Hodgman -
“I'm a personality - like a George Plimpton who effectively plays himself in a bunch of different roles, or a Paul Lynde-type character.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated.”
-- John Hodgman -
“The few people who ask to have their photographs with me, I almost always say yes, except for a few circumstances, like when my family is around.”
-- John Hodgman -
“As a freelance writer, I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.”
-- John Hodgman -
“We estimate that there are perhaps 20,000 prehistoric hunter-gatherers frozen up in those glaciers. Now, if they simply thaw and wander around, it's not a problem, but if they find a leader - a Captain Caveman, if you will - we'll be facing an even more serious problem.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable.”
-- John Hodgman -
“It seems that every generation needs its public, tweedy, literary personality to sell its consumer electronics. To whatever degree I can live up to the Plimptonian legacy, I am humble and proud.”
-- John Hodgman -
“I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to 'truthiness.'”
-- John Hodgman -
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“I have a lot of cultural references that have amassed in my brain like shrapnel over the years that are meaningful to me.”
-- John Hodgman -
“It would be rather naive to imagine that Oprah doesn't have an Earth Evacuation Plan. You know Richard Branson does - his is in plain sight.”
-- John Hodgman -
“Most people presume my mustache is not real because it's much darker than my regular hair.”
-- John Hodgman -
“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.”
-- John HodgmanSource : "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.
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“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.”
-- John HodgmanSource : "John Hodgman, part one: the global superpocalypse". Interview with Scott Tobias, tv.avclub.com. November 8, 2011.
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“More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross; but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective, that is all that writing is about.”
-- John Hodgman -
“Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.”
-- John Hodgman -
“It’s been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“That which is hard to do is best done bitterly.”
-- John Hodgman -
“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.”
-- John Hodgman -
“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.”
-- John Hodgman -
“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.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“Stories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.”
-- John Hodgman -
“I still have a fondness for books. Many a time I will be antiquing, and I'll say, 'What's that old-timey curio over there? What is that, a candlestick telephone, one of those old pull-chain toilets? Oh no, it's a book. I used to help make those things! I will buy it and use it to decorate my chain of casual family-dining restaurants.”
-- John Hodgman -
“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.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“I believe that the federal government should be laying down broadband like Eisenhower laid down interstates.”
-- John Hodgman -
“There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.”
-- John Hodgman -
“When I listen to music - I don't particularly do it for fun all that much. It's not a big part of my life, and I'm not really on top of what's happening in the world of music in the way I was when I was a teenager.”
-- John Hodgman -
“Well, I always had this desire to celebrate and somehow be a part of things that I thought were really great.”
-- John Hodgman -
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“Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.”
-- John Hodgman
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