John Hodgman

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

“I'm a personality - like a George Plimpton who effectively plays himself in a bunch of different roles, or a Paul Lynde-type character.”

“Hosting a TV show is a full-time job in which success is defined by it never ending.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Not as many people watch 'Doctor Who' as watch the Super Bowl, obviously, but the tropes that attract nerds are no longer a secret cult. It's a much larger culture, in the specific sense.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“The most important book on the Internet is, essentially, the Internet.”

“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.”

“What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum! That's an amusing relic of our past.”

“We have all been empowered by the web: everyone with a keyboard can now effectively broadcast to a national audience. In a sense, it puts each of us on the same footing as the major media conglomerates, except for AOL, who now apparently own all our thoughts and teeth.”

“I have a lot of cultural references that have amassed in my brain like shrapnel over the years that are meaningful to me.”

“As a freelance writer, I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.”