John Hodgman

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do.”

“I am not an Internet superstar.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Any time you try to create an Internet meme, automatic fail. That's like the worst thing you can do.”

“My fame is due to broadcast television.”

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

“For 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.”

“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.”

“If you look in the dictionary under 'perfectionist,' you see Henry Selick correcting the definition of perfectionist in the dictionary. I mean, he is so meticulous.”

“My career as a magazine writer was largely prefaced on the idea of curiosity, to go on adventures and weasel my way into the lives of people that I admire.”

“People forget how outcast 'They Might Be Giants' can be. They have a reputation for writing really deft, funny, clever melodies, and they also make a lot of music for kids, which is terrific, but when you see them in concert, they can rock the house.”