John Hodgman Quotations | Page 2

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.

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.

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.

I think that by the time I start writing the third book, of course, I will be President Of The United States, and that also will have something to do with it. I'll probably have to acknowledge that somehow.

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.

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.

That which is hard to do is best done bitterly.

Anyone of conscience could come look at my book and see it as an esoteric oddity or be intrigued by it. It could happen either way on a thousand different little decisions each individual might make.

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

You are only pretentious if you are not sincere.

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

To want to become the President is, I think, such a bizarre ambition that it is automatically deranging.

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.

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

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 am not an Internet superstar. I am, ironically perhaps, the most old media superstar of all time. My fame is due to broadcast television.

I have an unfortunate compulsion. I really would rather not do it, as it is very nerve-wracking and un-fun. But when it works, there is nothing like it.

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.

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

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

People who run for president seriously and people who become president enter a bizarre secret society in which they have had an experience that none of us will ever have.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

I believe that the federal government should be laying down broadband like Eisenhower laid down interstates.

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.

I was always fascinated with the way that things pop on the Internet - the ways you build communities and create little stories and ideas that people play around with and send back to you.

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.

I would be good for maybe not the center square but an upper square on 'Hollywood Squares.'

I'm a personality - like a George Plimpton who effectively plays himself in a bunch of different roles, or a Paul Lynde-type character.

The very idea that there is no truth, but only the filter of narrative through which truth is invented is something I learned at the feet of the most leftist professors at Yale and am learning again from Sarah Palin during the Vice Presidential debate, and I find that very disorienting.

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.

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.

My fame is due to broadcast television.

It was inevitable that in the proliferation of media and media channels and the natural debasing of authority that comes when you make an expert of someone who knows a few things and can be on television and you put the word "expert" underneath them, that is to say me, then eventually the very concept of expertise itself would become meaningless.

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.

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.

Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.

The reality is that there is an enormous value to gut-check instinctive decision-making in the world that is not hampered by reams and reams of research and complexity.

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

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

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

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

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

Any time you try to create an Internet meme, automatic fail. That's like the worst thing you can do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum! That's an amusing relic of our past.

I think for the foreseeable future, the truth is going to be awful and funny all at the same time.

As you know, the thing that I know the least about is the topic of sports.

Comedy does offer an avenue to television and film careers for untelegenic people that great drama does not.

I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to 'truthiness.'

From a very selfish point of view, I'm enchanted by the idea that a politician can come along and speak simply and clearly and truthfully to an electorate as though they are grown-ups and to feel the electorate respond to that.

I am not an Internet superstar.

Hosting a TV show is a full-time job in which success is defined by it never ending.

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.

My candidacy is a compelling argument for my candidacy. I want to be President.

I know nothing about letting go.

Creating fake facts does require a measure of haphazard research, insofar as they need to not just be possible, but also interesting.

Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it.

The reality is that if you want to be in a reality-based community, you've got to respect reality and that means calling it bad when you see the past ahead and it doesn't look good and acknowledging when it's going to work.

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

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.

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

The fact is I'm very self-similar.

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.

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

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.