Quotes from John Hodgman


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


I am not an Internet superstar.


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


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


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


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


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.


In the '80s and '90s, I was really interested in, moved by, exhilarated by, and troubled by rap in all the ways a white person from Brookline, Massachusetts should be. That was music that was making trouble, and it was interesting and provocative trouble.


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.


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.


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.