Best 153 quotes of John Hodgman on MyQuotes

John Hodgman

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

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

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    John Hodgman

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

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

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

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    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.

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    John Hodgman

    As a live stand-up comedy performer, I have the benefit of choosing real entrance music.

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    John Hodgman

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

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    John Hodgman

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

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    By the time I was writing the second book, my life had changed rather dramatically, thanks to the intervention of television, and I needed to find a way to discuss that. Otherwise the big, fake book would not be true on some level.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

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

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    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.

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    John Hodgman

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

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    Elwyn Brooks White was a very Maine personality which is, "I hate everyone and everyone stay away from me.

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    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.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

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

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    For many years, people would say, "Only child? Must have been terrible," and I wanted to say, "You are mentally ill, because it was the greatest." You got all the attention. You never had to share anything. No one ever ate your food. No one ever took your toys. But the unintended consequence was that I didn't appreciate that being universally loved was not only not required for happiness, but also not possible.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

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

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    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.

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    John Hodgman

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

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    I am not an Internet superstar.

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    John Hodgman

    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!

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    John Hodgman

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

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    John Hodgman

    I am someone who values knowledge, actual knowledge. I also value stories and fiction a whole lot, and that's where the fake knowledge comes in.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

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

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    I don't care if I tell that story and John Roderick gets up afterward and yells, 'I hope you enjoyed the white privilege, mortality comedy of John Hodgman!' That's me!" I'm going to play a sad Handsome Family song at the end and I guarantee you everyone is going to love it because, sometimes, you need a grown man or woman to tell you what you like.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    I don't watch television. And certainly not ads; I loathe advertising.

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    John Hodgman

    I don't wish to brag, but I'm very intelligent.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

    I had some very, very fond memories of the people I worked with and the authors I worked with - and I won't mention any names - but as I have been traveling through rural Maine over the past few weeks, one of my favorite things to do is to go into bookstores on the side of rural routes and paw through the old copies of Tom Clancy and Trevanian books they have in there for weird old 1970s thrillers that I haven't read yet.

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    John Hodgman

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

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    John Hodgman

    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.

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    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.