Top 160 John Hodgman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— John Hodgman

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

— John Hodgman

53. “Manly deeds, womanly hands.”

— John Hodgman

54. “When you live in New York or any big city, it is easy to fail at growing up. The city is designed to keep you in a state of perpetual adolescence.”

— John Hodgman

55. “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 Hodgman

56. “I cannot remember whether this was my decision or her command. Maintaining such fogginess about free will is, I think, a secret to a lasting marriage.”

— John Hodgman

57. “I grew to really love the exquisite humiliation of auditioning. When you audition for a role, everything is organized around reminding you that you do not matter. It’s the best therapy I ever received.”

— John Hodgman

58. “By the way, if I have my own cult of personality with my own geodetic dome in western Massachusetts, I will have a hurt yurt for anyone who crosses me.”

— John Hodgman

59. “There are many joys of parenting, but ultimately we are robots training our own upgrades to replace us.”

— John Hodgman

60. “I 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 Hodgman

61. “Even in my own life, there are memories I have that are difficult to explain – happenings that are so odd and unaccountably weird, that it is difficult to imagine they were not the result of prolonged and frequent contact with aliens throughout my life.”

— John Hodgman

62. “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.”

— John Hodgman

63. “Maine Humor” is a very specific subset of comedy. It consists mostly of men with flinty, Down East accents giving bad directions to people from away.”

— John Hodgman

64. “I 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 Hodgman

65. “There are times when all the lies you have told about yourself to yourself just fall away. In your twenties, you tell yourself the lie that you are unusual, unprecedented, and interesting. You do this largely by purchasing things or stealing things. You adorn yourself with songs and clothes and borrowed ideas and poses. In your thirties, you tell yourself the lie that you are still in your twenties.”

— John Hodgman

66. “Maine is not a death cult. I mean, it is, but it’s a slow one. It creeps in like the tide, and without your even noticing, the ground around you is swallowed by water until it’s gone.”

— John Hodgman

67. “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.”

— John Hodgman

68. “I naturally own a lot of very old magazines. And I enjoy going to old magazines because the advertisements in those magazines tended to have thousands of words of copy in them.”

— John Hodgman

69. “When you’re sitting down and you’re blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you’re channeling something else.”

— John Hodgman

70. “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.”

— John Hodgman

71. “The fact is I’m very self-similar.”

— John Hodgman

72. “To want to become the President is, I think, such a bizarre ambition that it is automatically deranging.”

— John Hodgman

73. “Most people presume my mustache is not real because it’s much darker than my regular hair.”

— John Hodgman

74. “Writing for me always requires trickery. Tricking myself into sitting down, letting words tumble out until you find the good ones. t’s sort of a trance. And when a piece is done, I have little memory of how I wrote it, and zero confidence I’d ever be able to do it again.”

— John Hodgman

75. “I am someone who values truth – actual truth as opposed to “truthiness.” I am also someone who has been trained in deconstruction in the literary theory department of Yale University, so I am someone who is tempted to believe that no absolute truth is possible.”

— John Hodgman

76. “When a good friend gives you his or her book, you don’t want to read it, because you’re afraid that it’s not going be what you hope it can be.”

— John Hodgman

77. “The sun touches Maine first among every state in the US. But Maine likes to confuse people and generally feels conflicted on the subject of light and warmth, so its shattered coastline of necks and points and isles hides from the sun, facing any direction but east.”

— John Hodgman

78. “Moxie’s own medicinal cred derived from a bitter slap of gentian root, giving it a flavor profile somewhere between Dr Pepper and witch hazel. It is difficult to enjoy even ironically, and so it has largely stayed within the confines of Massachusetts and Maine, where it is sometimes mixed with coffee brandy, as the people of Maine have a punishing streak of self-hatred that makes Bostonians seem like lighthearted imps.”

— John Hodgman

79. “There’s no peace in dying, but there’s peace when it’s done.”

— John Hodgman

80. “Well, I always had this desire to celebrate and somehow be a part of things that I thought were really great.”

— John Hodgman

81. “First of all, I wish I could grow a beard.”

— John Hodgman

82. “I’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 Hodgman

83. “The 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 Hodgman

84. “My cairns were obvious, pretentious, rococo.”

— John Hodgman

85. “From a very selfish point of view, I’m enchanted by the idea that a politician can come along and speak simply and clearly and truthfully to an electorate as though they are grown-ups and to feel the electorate respond to that.”

— John Hodgman

86. “I don’t watch television. And certainly not ads; I loathe advertising.”

— John Hodgman

87. “I am not an Internet superstar.”

— John Hodgman

88. “I am from Brookline, Massachusetts, but I was technically born in a hospital in Cambridge. So now you have a critical answer to many of my internet security questions. And as this book is about being honest with you for once, I will also tell you that my mother’s maiden name was Callahan. Enjoy my Amazon Prime account and all my money.”

— John Hodgman

89. “At some point I asked her if she was at peace with the idea of dying. She looked at me like I was stupid and insane. “No,” she said. “I want to live.” You idiot! would have finished the sentence nicely. It was one of the only times she seemed really disappointed in me. I realized I had learned everything I know about death from movies. There is no peace in dying.”

— John Hodgman

90. “Just because you see an iceberg does not mean that there isn’t global warming.”

— John Hodgman

91. “I’m not a particularly religious person, but that feeling of getting transmissions from someplace else, even if it’s from your own consciousness, is very, very real. To me, at least.”

— John Hodgman

92. “My candidacy is a compelling argument for my candidacy. I want to be President.”

— John Hodgman

93. “I’m not sure if that answers the question and I have absolutely no problem with any major world religion on Earth.”

— John Hodgman

94. “Even the worst job has its benefits and so does being a professional literary agent, and – I know I said this at the time but I still believe it – the worst job is the one that you know is wrong for you, but you still do it. You’re afraid to quit.”

— John Hodgman

95. “I’ve only ever been mistaken for myself. People draw a lot of comparisons to all of the round-faced, mustached men of entertainment that make me cringe and sick to my stomach about how the world really sees me and they’re right.”

— John Hodgman

96. “What more is there to say than it was traumatic, a moment that breaks your life in half? That you never heal from it, and it blankets your life in sadness and fear forever?”

— John Hodgman

97. “There is a need for expertise, for real expertise. I’m not doing much to help that cause, but I think we can find the healthy balance between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. Jocks and nerds may come together, I believe it.”

— John Hodgman

98. “I really wouldn’t censor myself. But because it was on such a slower scale, I would throw things out, and I indulged the personal stuff as little flashes of truth. Little in-jokes for anyone who was paying particular attention.”

— John Hodgman

99. “It would be rather naive to imagine that Oprah doesn’t have an Earth Evacuation Plan. You know Richard Branson does – his is in plain sight.”

— John Hodgman

100. “Panic is an incredibly catalyzing creative force. And almost out of sheer necessity, I found I had to talk about myself and my real life as it is effectively lived by me.”

— John Hodgman