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."
John HodgmanTerry Gross has never had me on her show and you know, it's her show; she sets the agenda and that's not Hodgman. But I'll still listen to it.
John HodgmanI 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.
John HodgmanI have no skills. I mean, I can make jokes, I'm pretty good at talking to people on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. I can figure out what makes a pretty good story, and I can make eggs really well.
John HodgmanComedy does offer an avenue to television and film careers for untelegenic people that great drama does not.
John HodgmanI say, if you're going to eat a creature alive, you have to expect some screaming. That is the carnivore's burden.
John HodgmanLies 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.
John HodgmanI think that by the time I start writing the third book, of course, I will be President Of The United States, and that also will have something to do with it. I'll probably have to acknowledge that somehow.
John HodgmanThis 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.
John HodgmanI think, as we all learn as a child, you have to learn to tolerate ambiguity better and I'm still terrible at it and I hate it; even the word ambiguity makes me sick to me stomach.
John HodgmanI think in American culture, we put value on economic success but tell people you don't have to be economically successful to be happy.
John HodgmanGenerally speaking, I, like anyone else who does anything publicly, like it when people like what I do, and would like to hear as much.
John HodgmanTonally, there was no discussion; I just don’t know any other way to do it. I don’t want to make people feel bad, and I don’t want to make their problems into a joke. I do love telling people when they’re right and wrong, but for the most part, it was always going to be about real fights where people have a real difference of opinion and a real dispute. I want to make jokes, but I also want to make a decision that is fair.
John HodgmanI never stopped feeling abject terror until I got on television and went on a national ad campaign and realized, "I will be able to feed my children. I have somehow averted the destiny that awaited me, which is endless, crippling debt forever."
John HodgmanI believe that the federal government should be laying down broadband like Eisenhower laid down interstates.
John HodgmanThis is something that the nimblest standup comedians learn, over time, to handle gracefully. They'll go between prepared material, then they'll respond to what's happening in the room and weave it back into the prepared material and so on.
John HodgmanI realized that we're now at a point of self-reference with the Internet culture that there's almost no there left, you know? It's important to make new things. It's important to make culture, rather than simply reference it. I love a good cultural reference, and it's one of the great joys in my life, but it has to all be in balance with the core job, which is to make something new. And that sort of brings me around to why I started talking about my fondness for marijuana.
John HodgmanFor 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.
John HodgmanMy memories of literary agenting are of a very happy time and there are surprising reminders of it coming back now.
John HodgmanPart of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.
John HodgmanThe very idea that there is no truth, but only the filter of narrative through which truth is invented is something I learned at the feet of the most leftist professors at Yale and am learning again from Sarah Palin during the Vice Presidential debate, and I find that very disorienting.
John HodgmanMost people presume my mustache is not real because it's much darker than my regular hair.
John HodgmanHere'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.
John HodgmanI've made my evolutionary purpose and had children. I don't care if anybody likes me, I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to do a whole comedy show about swimming in the loathsomely cold waters of Maine.
John HodgmanI think there are very few invisible musical instrument players out there who can claim the chops and sheer perseverance of Björn Türoque, the world's perennial second-place air guitar champion. Whoever this Dan Crane might be, he's captured the mad, seductive spirit of the arbitrary skill contest perfectly, and rocks it hard into the hot Finnish night. There is no number of umlauts that do this Jekyll and Hyde of air-rocking justice.
John HodgmanI 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.
John HodgmanOne 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.
John HodgmanI 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!
John HodgmanIt’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.
John HodgmanSo much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.
John HodgmanThe only time I've ever been mistaken for someone else is - and this arguable still - when a person came up to me on the boardwalk of Ocean City, New Jersey and said, "You look a lot like that guy from computer ads" and I said, "There is a reason because I am that guy," and the guy looked at me for a minute, laughed and said, "That's a funny joke, but you really do look like him." He thought I was not me.
John HodgmanI used to enjoy the anonymity of being a literary figure and occasionally a public radio figure.
John HodgmanI 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.
John Hodgman