Quotes from Randall Munroe

I have always had trouble paying attention. When I was supposed to be at work, I'd be doodling. But then when I was home, trying to draw, I would be working on math problems. I never end up doing exactly what I should be doing at at any given time.

What people don't appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls. Most humans probably couldn't manage it, and they've had a lifetime of practice at walking without falling over.

I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals - or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it's not all that interesting.

Some of the first infographics I did started off as notes to myself: trying to plot out, for instance, how IP addresses are allocated. After a while, I thought, 'This is a neat thing I can share with people, and they can follow me along in that process of understanding.'

I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights. Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles - normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations.

It's amazing what's buried in old, poorly digitized PDFs hosted on some random professor's website.

Once I got married, I started working from an office. I found that having somewhere to go that isn't my house is mentally helpful: 'This is the place where I answer email and write blog posts,' and 'over there is the place where I do the dishes.'

I have the standard cartoonist setup, which is one of those Cintiq tablets, and a laptop. If I'm mostly writing code, I'm on the laptop, and if I'm mostly drawing, I'm on the Cintiq.

One of the things I've learned with doing 'xkcd' is that you sort of give people, 'Here's the thing, and here's the button you can press to get another thing.' Sometimes that can be more easy to digest than, 'Here's a long page of things.'

There is a danger of building an identity around the idea of being smart because it is very easy to become off-putting, to become exclusionary.

You don't use science to show you're right, you use science to become right.

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there.'

Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out.

I think the weirdest question I've ever gotten was, 'If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes?'

The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I've ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I've spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.

It used to be if you wanted to do a newspaper comic, you had to appeal to a pretty big chunk of the newspaper's readership for them to want to keep you around. 'Dilbert' would be office humor, but even that is pretty widely experienced.

An artist shouldn't be judged by how many people like his art but by how pure and good it is - but I think that when you're telling jokes, which is more what I'm doing, if people aren't laughing, you're telling bad jokes.

I have no artistic training - as you might have guessed from all the stick figures! - and there are a few things I have a really hard time drawing. I think the one that comes up the most is airplanes. Big airliners have such a weird wing shape, and I always have to redraw them 20 times before they're even recognizable.

I think that putting merchandising into the hands of the artist themselves is one of the best things for the artist.

I love learning about the science that governs the universe around us and want to share the delight of discovering how things work and why.

A lot of people will refer to comics by number to me, and I'll realize they're expecting me to remember all the comics by number. And I can't even remember what I ate this morning, let alone which comic was #473!

I try not to spend too much time interpreting my comics for people, because I try to put out there whatever I can, and people can draw whatever conclusions they want.

It's weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the Universe.

A lot of the time, when I find myself critiquing scientific accuracy in movies, I have to remind myself that it had to get close enough to getting it right to get things wrong.