Best 16 quotes of Tom Bodett on MyQuotes

Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.

For some people, you know, Garrison Keillor, Rush Limbaugh, really the stars, they've got a passion. They eat, drink and breathe radio, and I'm not like that. I used to think I wanted to be. But I need to be away from it, too, and that's the difference, I think.

I come from very common stock, and I've always been uncomfortable with pretension and all the forms it can take, including disingenuous broadcasting.

I'm not an impersonator. I've only got one voice and only do one guy and his first-person essays.

In the America I see from here, anything is possible - especially the impossible.

It's not like Alaska isn't wilderness - it mostly is. But most Alaskans don't live in the wild. They live on the edge of the wild in towns with schools and cable TV and stores and dentists and roller rinks sometimes. It's just like anyplace else, only with mountains and moose.

Kids in Alaska don't know they're growing up on the Last Frontier. It's just what they see on the license plates, and it's something tourists like to say a lot because they've never been around so many mountains and moose before.

Like most Alaska immigrants, my roots continue to petition for equal time.

People feel vulnerable when they travel. Nobody wants to be taken advantage of or talked into something they don't want. Staying at Motel 6 makes you feel smarter. In fact, I think it actually means you are smarter, but I have no hard data to support that.

Professor Al Drake encouraged me to just write the way I talk. I decided if that's what I needed to do, I didn't need to be in school to do it.

Somebody says, 'Do a Tom Bodett, a folksy kind of thing,' and it sounds like something out of 'Hee Haw,' very insulting. They turn wry humor into disparaging sarcasm, and you get what amounts to insulting advertising.

That's what the American odyssey is really about: Leaving home. Leaving home and coming home, and trying to understand the difference.

The difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist laughs to forget, but a pessimist forgets to laugh.

The media is in the business of finding exceptions to everyday life. Bad things are still the exception. That's good, because once bad things stop being news, we really are in trouble. If people forget that bad is the exception, they think they live in a horrible world. There is so much that works and is right and friendly and warm. But we take that for granted.

Tom Kizzia hasn't just observed and written about Alaska for three-plus decades, he's lived it. 'Pilgrim's Wilderness' is a story that needed to be told by the only man who could tell it.

You can make a new friend but you can't make an old one.