Top 100 Hodgman Quotes

#1. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #8753
#2. 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

Hodgman Quotes #27871
#3. I think that obviously, there is a perverse attraction to a fundamentally changed world or the end of the world. There is a death wish, a perverse death wish. Not just for ourselves, not just for the movie 'Death Wish,' but for the end of all human life.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #45319
#4. What I collect? Interesting jobs. Always to my thrill and excitement, but ultimately to my exhaustion, I collect interesting jobs. If an interesting job comes along, I take it; that's why I do so many things. I'm lucky to be able to.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #46242
#5. I don't watch television. And certainly not ads; I loathe advertising.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #52133
#6. You must always, always tell the truth. If you are mad, say so. If someone asks you anything, try to find the exact words to describe what you have to say. If you try to tell the exact truth, always, you will ground yourself, become yourself. The truth connects you. It hooks you back up.

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #59461
#7. First of all, I wish I could grow a beard.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #78208
#8. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #101190
#9. I feel that there is a decision people make to either engage in a legitimately ridiculous process to get your kid into school, or choose not to engage in that so much, and end up finding a nice local school that fits.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #123124
#10. So much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #124689
#11. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #130085
#12. Hosting a TV show is a full-time job in which success is defined by it never ending.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #131457
#13. old people who are failing get the angriest with those they are most attached to, the people who make them realize they are no longer themselves.

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #142507
#14. 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

Hodgman Quotes #147325
#15. I think in American culture, we put value on economic success but tell people you don't have to be economically successful to be happy.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #153185
#16. Comedy does offer an avenue to television and film careers for untelegenic people that great drama does not.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #164501
#17. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald meet in hell and team up to assassinate Satan.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #186587
#18. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #202710
#19. The fact is I'm very self-similar.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #205393
#20. I would say 70 percent of people who are in therapy are in therapy not because of their upbringing, not because of their mean sister or obsessions, but because of anxiety brought about by lack of financial security.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #212357
#21. I know nothing about letting go.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #227560
#22. I am an unlikely guardian. A month ago I thought the Medicare doughnut hole was a breakfast special for seniors. I am a care inflictor.

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #266108
#23. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #269649
#24. I made an impulse buy of a house in Maine to make my wife happy and now have gone back into debt and it's all started over for me.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #294410
#25. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #303893
#26. 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

Hodgman Quotes #313498
#27. Mom hopped up to turn off the burner, but it subsided before she got there. 'If this--whatever it is--starts playing with fire,' she said through clenched teeth, 'I'm going to give it a spanking.

Ann Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #321581
#28. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #336065
#29. ...I think of all the people quietly doing so many things that are hard.

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #358040
#30. Creating fake facts does require a measure of haphazard research, insofar as they need to not just be possible, but also interesting.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #363163
#31. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #364316
#32. You wouldn't want to live a life in which you are loved or approved by all people on Earth or even within your own geodetic dome full of your jumpsuited followers.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #408670
#33. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #428901
#34. She wrote sniffing back the tears that flowed over the version of things that her unconscious insisted on sicking up.

Helen Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #455318
#35. I am amused by cricket because it seems to take longer than baseball and I like that. It seems like a sport I could have made up it - it takes several days to play and everyone wears sweaters. I can't confess to knowing what's going on at all.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #465436
#36. Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Paul Whiteman, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra, Lionel Hampton, the Mills Brothers, Woody Herman, and Nat King Cole. "Mona Lisa, men have named you,

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #466163
#37. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #468657
#38. My fame is due to broadcast television.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #480248
#39. Publishers, editors, agents all have one thing in common, aside from their love of cocktail parties. It's an incredible taste and an ability to find and nurture authors.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #504973
#40. Even the worst job has its benefits and so does being a professional literary agent, and - I know I said this at the time but I still believe it - the worst job is the one that you know is wrong for you, but you still do it. You're afraid to quit.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #506048
#41. Panic is an incredibly catalyzing creative force. And almost out of sheer necessity, I found I had to talk about myself and my real life as it is effectively lived by me.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #508277
#42. Life's so simple, thought Jill, if only you can strike the right note. All it needed was a little give-and-take. She'd often said so.

Helen Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #535108
#43. I don't wish to brag, but I'm very intelligent.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #536440
#44. I really wouldn't censor myself. But because it was on such a slower scale, I would throw things out, and I indulged the personal stuff as little flashes of truth. Little in-jokes for anyone who was paying particular attention.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #540477
#45. What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum! That's an amusing relic of our past.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #546163
#46. I had the pleasure of listening to Rickie Lee Jones' Flying Cowboys album on audio cassette, which had just come out at that time because I am an elderly man.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #555703
#47. 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".

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #571078
#48. 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

Hodgman Quotes #578625
#49. I say, if you're going to eat a creature alive, you have to expect some screaming. That is the carnivore's burden.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #601992
#50. If Betty turned against you, she would take you on, but if she loved someone, they would never stand alone.

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #616751
#51. 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

Hodgman Quotes #657512
#52. 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 Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #671078
#53. I suspect that when the truth ceases to be heartbreakingly funny, we will be in a better place and a happier society over all.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #673484
#54. Only the nerds will save the earth.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #689876
#55. There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #703475
#56. 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

Hodgman Quotes #718873
#57. When I let my mind wander back that far, what I see is how hard we tried to be our best for one another. In

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #748171
#58. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #750485
#59. 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

Hodgman Quotes #760207
#60. 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

Hodgman Quotes #765336
#61. I think, as we all learn as a child, you have to learn to tolerate ambiguity better and I'm still terrible at it and I hate it; even the word ambiguity makes me sick to me stomach.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #777180
#62. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #804147
#63. That which is hard to do is best done bitterly.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #818994
#64. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #820397
#65. 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!

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #832634
#66. 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

Hodgman Quotes #839503
#67. I actually own a copy of my own book; that's how dedicated I am as an author.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #849221
#68. Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #855303
#69. My memories of literary agenting are of a very happy time and there are surprising reminders of it coming back now.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #880859
#70. We cannot wholly rely, as though it were Medieval times, [on the notion that] the only reality is what we see in front of us. There are germs. There are changes that are happening in our planet's ecology that are happening over such a long period of time that we cannot see the changes.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #896860
#71. I am a marginally employed person who can escape with my school teacher wife to the waters of Maine for much of the summer.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #911158
#72. He loved me, as so many have loved the children who turned out to be so different, "in spite of." I didn't want "in spite of.

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #916787
#73. 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

Hodgman Quotes #917639
#74. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #927125
#75. 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

Hodgman Quotes #946433
#76. A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #959134
#77. It was October in Pennsylvania and on the first morning the ground was frosted. As I walked to breakfast, some guy yelled out, 'Thirteen inches in the Poconos.'
'Is that I porn film?' I asked.

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #961126
#78. 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

Hodgman Quotes #964083
#79. 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

Hodgman Quotes #997424
#80. He saw with sudden awful clarity that if he turned tail now and if, by some appalling miracle, she should survive, he'd never hear the end of it. She'd latch onto his flawed character and hold it up for relentless ridicule till the end of time, or thereabouts.

Helen Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #999419
#81. My whole creative career is a product of the Internet ... I'll take that back. To some degree. My fascination with cultural esoterica and trivia and so on was well-formed long before I got my first AOL account.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1004522
#82. Thanks to Steven, I rode on a bus with the Gay Men's chorus, which he and the doctor had joined. All the way they sang. When I looked at Steven and made a face, he looked offended, but I didn't care. It was way too early in the morning for anything from Sweeney Todd.

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1010325
#83. I've made my evolutionary purpose and had children. I don't care if anybody likes me, I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to do a whole comedy show about swimming in the loathsomely cold waters of Maine.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1012496
#84. All books should be trilogies; I mean I think we all agree on that.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1025459
#85. I naturally own a lot of very old magazines. And I enjoy going to old magazines because the advertisements in those magazines tended to have thousands of words of copy in them.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1034941
#86. 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.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1043151
#87. Many people, many girls have tried to teach me the rules to football. And you would think that it would get in my head that way, but I just don't understand it.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1053914
#88. I'm not a particularly religious person, but that feeling of getting transmissions from someplace else, even if it's from your own consciousness, is very, very real. To me, at least.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1069949
#89. Just because you see an iceberg does not mean that there isn't global warming.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1072110
#90. While I understand that all things must come to an end, whether it's a television advertisement or one's life or the world itself, it doesn't make it any easier to deal with.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1088122
#91. complete list of

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1089375
#92. I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to 'truthiness.'

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1091112
#93. 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

Hodgman Quotes #1093323
#94. Not as many people watch 'Doctor Who' as watch the Super Bowl, obviously, but the tropes that attract nerds are no longer a secret cult. It's a much larger culture, in the specific sense.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1094471
#95. By the way, if I have my own cult of personality with my own geodetic dome in western Massachusetts, I will have a hurt yurt for anyone who crosses me.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1103836
#96. 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

Hodgman Quotes #1108248
#97. People forced to live by conventions are always the first to enforce them.

George Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1130670
#98. My candidacy is a compelling argument for my candidacy. I want to be President.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1130682
#99. I am not an Internet superstar.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1136241
#100. A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.

John Hodgman

Hodgman Quotes #1148448

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