John Hodgman Quotes - Page 3

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.

Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.

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

One of the things about crowd work that's so exciting is when you discover a character in the audience who's interesting or funny, who you can vibe off of. If someone's got a weird job that you can make reference to throughout, or you can bring that person onstage - humiliate them, or celebrate them! You can put people in conversation with one another. The best is when something that they're doing can reflect back on something that you're doing.

Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures, they usually do a pretty good (or pretty awful, but always interesting) job of lying.

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.

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.

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.

This is not to say there are not Chicagoans. But I would suggest that they are a nomadic people, whose lost home exists only in their minds, and in the glowing crystal memory cells they all carry in the palms of their hands: a great idea of a second city, lit with life and love, reasonable drink prices at cool bars, and, of course, blocks and blocks of bright and devastating fire.

Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable.

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

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.

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.

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

Well, I always had this desire to celebrate and somehow be a part of things that I thought were really great.

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.

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

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.

People like what they like. They're gonna do what they're gonna do.

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.

I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to 'truthiness.'

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

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.

I know electric knives are excellent for carving turkeys that have had their bones removed and been forced into a mold to shape them. Please note that those turkeys are called hams.

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.