Top 160 John Hodgman Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “Everything we make in life, eventually, is sold for a dollar or a penny or given away;.”

— John Hodgman

107. “Terry Gross. I would rush home from high school to listen to Terry Gross.”

— John Hodgman

108. “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.”

— John Hodgman

109. “Every evening my wife makes us martinis and we talk about our days as I cook dinner and our children ignore us. It is a great pleasure in our lives: this rediscovering of each other as our children age. It is our indulgence.”

— John Hodgman

110. “Generally speaking, I think it is fair to say that I am a friend to the creatures of the Earth when I am not busy eating them or wearing them.”

— John Hodgman

111. “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.”

— John Hodgman

112. “It’s not a secret family like I have a beautiful, gorgeous wife in Tokyo; I have another mom and dad. I’m the kid and I have another mom and dad in Atwater Village, Los Angeles;.”

— John Hodgman

113. “This country is founded on some very noble ideals but also some very big lies. One is that everyone has a fair chance at success. Another is that rich people have to be smart and hardworking or else they wouldn’t be rich. Another is that if you’re not rich, don’t worry about it, because rich people aren’t really happy. I am the white male living proof that all of that is garbage.”

— John Hodgman

114. “Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable.”

— John Hodgman

115. “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.”

— John Hodgman

116. “The reality is that there is an enormous value to gut-check instinctive decision-making in the world that is not hampered by reams and reams of research and complexity.”

— John Hodgman

117. “I say, if you’re going to eat a creature alive, you have to expect some screaming. That is the carnivore’s burden.”

— John Hodgman

118. “I 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 Hodgman

119. “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.”

— John Hodgman

120. “So much of creativity is the feeling that you’re either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.”

— John Hodgman

121. “And then he could bring up the sail and let the prevailing winds carry him back to shore, thus making a living entirely on his own, almost without ever having to see or speak to another human ever in his life, which I am convinced is the secret dream of every person in Maine.”

— John Hodgman

122. “Everyone is doing what they have to do, and everyone is doing the best they can. And soon you will be going home.”

— John Hodgman

123. “My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He’s an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.”

— John Hodgman

124. “This is not to say that 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 that 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 Hodgman

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

— John Hodgman

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

— John Hodgman

127. “I realized that even in a world of proliferating media venues, online and in print, and on TV and on countless cable channels, the idea that I could be considered an expert on chronic knee pain was I think troubling for society, but very exciting for me.”

— John Hodgman

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

— John Hodgman

129. “I don’t wish to brag, but I’m very intelligent.”

— John Hodgman

130. “Hipsterism is the purposeful cultivation of uncool and esoteric tastes, and sometimes a shortcut to that aesthetic is to embrace the ugly.”

— John Hodgman

131. “He was over there making Yes album covers, and here I was, with my gaudy Trump Towers of rock junk.”

— John Hodgman

132. “I used to enjoy the anonymity of being a literary figure and occasionally a public radio figure.”

— John Hodgman

133. “I am a marginally employed person who can escape with my school teacher wife to the waters of Maine for much of the summer.”

— John Hodgman

134. “I am someone who values truth – actual truth as opposed to ‘truthiness.’”

— John Hodgman

135. “As a live stand-up comedy performer, I have the benefit of choosing real entrance music.”

— John Hodgman

136. “This is a book about me, at what I hope is the beginning of the second half of my life and not the brief, final tenth.”

— John Hodgman

137. “Unfortunately for humanity, I’ve gotten into the habit of providing my own closing music for shows by singing a song and playing the ukulele.”

— John Hodgman

138. “Jonathan is a musician and my best friend. I hope he does not read that last part. I would never call him my “best friend” to his face. I am from Massachusetts and he is from Connecticut, and New Englanders do not say things like that.”

— John Hodgman

139. “All books should be trilogies; I mean I think we all agree on that.”

— John Hodgman

140. “What I collect? Interesting jobs. Always to my thrill and excitement, but ultimately to my exhaustion, I collect interesting jobs. If an interesting job comes along, I take it; that’s why I do so many things. I’m lucky to be able to.”

— John Hodgman

141. “I love my father. It’s not his fault that he made up a fear and, in order to make it feel more real to him, gave it to me. I was obviously built to receive it.”

— John Hodgman

142. “We who are white men can’t change who we are. But we could do worse than to follow what I took that summer as his example: to be aware of and curious about the world around you, to give what you have with neither apology nor self-congratulation. When praise comes to see you, get out on the fire escape. When it’s someone else’s time to talk, listen. Don’t turn your house into a museum. When your work is done, get out of the way.”

— John Hodgman

143. “I have learned that newborn infants roll their eyes around and move their heads and their arms in short jerky spasms. And if you homeschool them, they will stay this way forever.”

— John Hodgman

144. “By the time I was writing the second book, my life had changed rather dramatically, thanks to the intervention of television, and I needed to find a way to discuss that. Otherwise the big, fake book would not be true on some level.”

— John Hodgman

145. “I have an unfortunate compulsion. I really would rather not do it, as it is very nerve-wracking and un-fun. But when it works, there is nothing like it.”

— John Hodgman

146. “Even as a grown-up, I love pretending to be a grown-up.”

— John Hodgman

147. “My fame is due to broadcast television.”

— John Hodgman

148. “Don’t concentrate on becoming a better humor writer, just concentrate on being the best writer that you can become. If you’re funny, the work will end up being funny. And if you’re not funny, the work will still end up being good. Concentrate on being the most honest writer you can be, and let everything else follow – because it will.”

— John Hodgman

149. “Anyone of conscience could come look at my book and see it as an esoteric oddity or be intrigued by it. It could happen either way on a thousand different little decisions each individual might make.”

— John Hodgman

150. “So I am a product of the Internet, and to some degree a product of this sensibility of constant cultural reference.”

— John Hodgman