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.

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 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.

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.

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

It's not a secret family like I have a beautiful, gorgeous wife in Tokyo; I have another mom and dad. I'm the kid and I have another mom and dad in Atwater Village, Los Angeles.

I'm an older, wall-eyed, overweight, tweedy writer who has been lucky enough to be asked to play various iterations of himself in a certain realm of popular cultutre. That gives me great joy and excitement, but I don't go to the media saying, "And I'm also the world's greatest actor."