Top 160 John Hodgman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Specificity is the soul of narrative.”

— John Hodgman

2. “That which is hard to do is best done bitterly.”

— John Hodgman

3. “Only the nerds will save the earth.”

— John Hodgman

4. “I am not beautiful, so I don’t know why I’m making myself ugly. But the mustache stays.”

— John Hodgman

5. “A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.”

— John Hodgman

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

— John Hodgman

7. “My type of humor is me not caring whether people know what I’m talking about or not.”

— John Hodgman

8. “Maine’s motto is “Vacationland,” but as far as I’m concerned, it should be, “Maine: Putting the ‘spite’ in hospitality since 1820.””

— John Hodgman

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

— John Hodgman

10. “You are only pretentious if you are not sincere.”

— John Hodgman

11. “Do not listen to the killjoys who tell you never to eat oysters in months that do not contain the letter R: May, June, July, August, Octoba. You know.”

— John Hodgman

12. “People like what they like. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do.”

— John Hodgman

13. “How to Win a Fight – Step 1: Always make eye contact. Step 2: Go ahead and use henchmen – these days it’s unnecessary and frowned upon to fight your own battles, especially with so many henchmen out of work. Step 3: Run lots of attack ads – I have run about 500 attack ads this year, and I expect that I will buy even more air time next year, because my enemies are getting stronger.”

— John Hodgman

14. “There is no ritual that enhances creativity other than just starting.”

— John Hodgman

15. “There are transitions in life whether we want them or not. You get older. You lose jobs and loves and people. The story of your life may change dramatically, tragically, or so quietly you don’t even notice. It’s never any fun, but it can’t be avoided. Sometimes you just have to walk into the cold dark water of the unfamiliar and suffer for a while.”

— John Hodgman

16. “Americans don’t need a metaphor for war. We have war. If anything, we use war as a metaphor for sports.”

— John Hodgman

17. “I would say aside from Moxie soda bottles and Masonic artifacts, there’s nothing I really collect.”

— John Hodgman

18. “I think for the foreseeable future, the truth is going to be awful and funny all at the same time.”

— John Hodgman

19. “I would say 70 percent of people who are in therapy are in therapy not because of their upbringing, not because of their mean sister or obsessions, but because of anxiety brought about by lack of financial security.”

— John Hodgman

20. “I am someone who values knowledge, actual knowledge. I also value stories and fiction a whole lot, and that’s where the fake knowledge comes in.”

— John Hodgman

21. “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.”

— John Hodgman

22. “A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.”

— John Hodgman

23. “After all, there’s no mansplaining like white mansplaining ’cause white mansplaining don’t stop.”

— John Hodgman

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

— John Hodgman

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

— John Hodgman

26. “I know nothing about letting go.”

— John Hodgman

27. “My name is John Hodgman; you live on the planet Earth; and everything is going to be fine.”

— John Hodgman

28. “I would definitely make eggs for the rest of my life if I could.”

— John Hodgman

29. “The Sky Lounge is not aspirational. It is desperational.”

— John Hodgman

30. “Money cannot buy happiness, but it buys the conditions for happiness: time, occasional freedom from constant worry, a moment of breath to plan for the future, and the ability to be generous.”

— John Hodgman

31. “Maine is a beautiful place that I paradoxically want to hoard to myself and share with everyone I meet.”

— John Hodgman

32. “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.”

— John Hodgman

33. “I wish she were alive, but I am grateful for her death. If she were alive, I would likely still be working at the literary agency. For how much longer in my life would I have believed there was time for everything? And by the time I faced my own mortality at the Bookmill in western Massachusetts, how much less would I have done? Her leaving taught me about the worst sadness, one we all must face eventually. I feel lucky I am better equipped to help others who are going through it now.”

— John Hodgman

34. “John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald meet in hell and team up to assassinate Satan.”

— John Hodgman

35. “Elwyn Brooks White was a very Maine personality which is, “I hate everyone and everyone stay away from me.””

— John Hodgman

36. “I am not an Internet superstar. I am, ironically perhaps, the most old media superstar of all time. My fame is due to broadcast television.”

— John Hodgman

37. “My favorite kind of science fiction is post-apocalyptic dystopia. But I just heard at the bar that genre is going out of style. Frankly, that’s not a future I want to live in.”

— John Hodgman

38. “The villain of any story is often the most compelling character.”

— John Hodgman

39. “The reality is that if you want to be in a reality-based community, you’ve got to respect reality and that means calling it bad when you see the past ahead and it doesn’t look good and acknowledging when it’s going to work.”

— John Hodgman

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

— John Hodgman

41. “Traffic counting was very boring and cold to sit out on the streets of New Haven in five pairs of pants – well, that’s an exaggeration; it was three pairs of pants – in November for hours and hours clicking buttons counting which cars go left, right, and forward.”

— John Hodgman

42. “You know the old saying: “History is written by the winners. And also, the team of hand-picked historians that the winner keeps hidden away in an underground bunker”.”

— John Hodgman

43. “Just a small-scale cult of personality, maybe raise a geodetic dome out in western Massachusetts and make people wear jumpsuits and give all their possessions to me.”

— John Hodgman

44. “Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.”

— John Hodgman

45. “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.”

— John Hodgman

46. “Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.”

— John Hodgman

47. “We estimate that there are perhaps 20,000 prehistoric hunter-gatherers frozen up in those glaciers. Now, if they simply thaw and wander around, it’s not a problem, but if they find a leader – a Captain Caveman, if you will – we’ll be facing an even more serious problem.”

— John Hodgman

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

— John Hodgman

49. “I 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 Hodgman

50. “Whatever you may have thought about Hillary Clinton, my daughter watched as a highly experienced and qualified woman lost a job to a neophyte dilettante cartoon character of a white man who openly bragged of molesting women. My daughter isn’t dumb. She got the message.”

— John Hodgman