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. – John Hodgman
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
Creating fake facts does require a measure of haphazard research, insofar as they need to not just be possible, but also interesting. – John Hodgman
More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross; but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective, that is all that writing is about. – John Hodgman
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
I feel that there is a decision people make to either engage in a legitimately ridiculous process to get your kid into school, or choose not to engage in that so much, and end up finding a nice local school that fits. – John Hodgman
Well, I always had this desire to celebrate and somehow be a part of things that I thought were really great. – John Hodgman
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
Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along. – John Hodgman
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. – John Hodgman
It seems that every generation needs its public, tweedy, literary personality to sell its consumer electronics. To whatever degree I can live up to the Plimptonian legacy, I am humble and proud. – John Hodgman
All I can ask from society is that it please stop telling me why I should like sports. – John Hodgman
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. – John Hodgman
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
There’s a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest – like the Steinbeckian social novel. – John Hodgman
Most people presume my mustache is not real because it’s much darker than my regular hair. – John Hodgman
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
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
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
In the ’80s and ’90s, I was really interested in, moved by, exhilarated by, and troubled by rap in all the ways a white person from Brookline, Massachusetts should be. That was music that was making trouble, and it was interesting and provocative trouble. – John Hodgman
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. – John Hodgman
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. – John Hodgman
