Top 100 John Hodgman Quotes
#1. I have no skills. I mean, I can make jokes, I'm pretty good at talking to people on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. I can figure out what makes a pretty good story, and I can make eggs really well.
John Hodgman
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I don't watch television. And certainly not ads; I loathe advertising.
John Hodgman
#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
#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
#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
#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
#12. Hosting a TV show is a full-time job in which success is defined by it never ending.
John Hodgman
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Comedy does offer an avenue to television and film careers for untelegenic people that great drama does not.
John Hodgman
#16. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald meet in hell and team up to assassinate Satan.
John Hodgman
#17. 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
#19. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Creating fake facts does require a measure of haphazard research, insofar as they need to not just be possible, but also interesting.
John Hodgman
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. I don't wish to brag, but I'm very intelligent.
John Hodgman
#37. 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
#38. What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum! That's an amusing relic of our past.
John Hodgman
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.
John Hodgman
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. That which is hard to do is best done bitterly.
John Hodgman
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. I actually own a copy of my own book; that's how dedicated I am as an author.
John Hodgman
#59. Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.
John Hodgman
#60. My memories of literary agenting are of a very happy time and there are surprising reminders of it coming back now.
John Hodgman
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.
John Hodgman
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. All books should be trilogies; I mean I think we all agree on that.
John Hodgman
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Just because you see an iceberg does not mean that there isn't global warming.
John Hodgman
#77. 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
#78. I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to 'truthiness.'
John Hodgman
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. My candidacy is a compelling argument for my candidacy. I want to be President.
John Hodgman
#85. A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.
John Hodgman
#86. Elwyn Brooks White was a very Maine personality which is, "I hate everyone and everyone stay away from me."
John Hodgman
#87. People forget how outcast 'They Might Be Giants' can be. They have a reputation for writing really deft, funny, clever melodies, and they also make a lot of music for kids, which is terrific, but when you see them in concert, they can rock the house.
John Hodgman
#88. I used to enjoy the anonymity of being a literary figure and occasionally a public radio figure.
John Hodgman
#89. Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war. If anything, we use war as a metaphor for sports.
John Hodgman
#90. My type of humor is me not caring whether people know what I'm talking about or not.
John Hodgman
#91. Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.
John Hodgman
#92. Terry Gross has never had me on her show and you know, it's her show; she sets the agenda and that's not Hodgman. But I'll still listen to it.
John Hodgman
#93. So I am a product of the Internet, and to some degree a product of this sensibility of constant cultural reference.
John Hodgman
#94. There is a need for expertise, for real expertise. I'm not doing much to help that cause, but I think we can find the healthy balance between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. Jocks and nerds may come together, I believe it.
John Hodgman
#95. To want to become the President is, I think, such a bizarre ambition that it is automatically deranging.
John Hodgman
#96. This is something that the nimblest standup comedians learn, over time, to handle gracefully. They'll go between prepared material, then they'll respond to what's happening in the room and weave it back into the prepared material and so on.
John Hodgman
#97. 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
#98. I never stopped feeling abject terror until I got on television and went on a national ad campaign and realized, "I will be able to feed my children. I have somehow averted the destiny that awaited me, which is endless, crippling debt forever."
John Hodgman
#99. Traffic counting was very boring and cold to sit out on the streets of New Haven in five pairs of pants - well, that's an exaggeration; it was three pairs of pants - in November for hours and hours clicking buttons counting which cars go left, right, and forward.
John Hodgman
#100. I think for the foreseeable future, the truth is going to be awful and funny all at the same time.
John Hodgman
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