Quotes from Randall Munroe

I read comics and I did science, and never really put them together until I accidentally found myself in the middle of one.

People often say, 'I like your comics, even though I don't know enough math to get all of them,' as if it's some kind of club where they don't belong. But there's no club. There's just lots of people who are excited about thinking, learning, joking, and sometimes overanalyzing things.

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

I'm sad that my childhood came just slightly before the lithium-ion-battery boom, because I would've killed for the cheap radio-controlled helicopters they have now.

Google owns YouTube, and recently, I drew a comic about an idea for a YouTube feature - which they actually took seriously and implemented. So I'm thinking that maybe we'll have a future where Google is 'xkcd.'

One of the nice things about the Internet is you can do a comic that's just for Ph.D. students, or for truck drivers, and you get to reach all of them without having to satisfy the other 99%.

People in my world can be disdainful of political and social problems and solutions. But we're never going to stop needing those.

It's tempting to just write a comic called 'Everyone Mail Randall Munroe Twenty Bucks' - maybe it would work, and I could just close down the 'xkcd' store and sit on a beach and draw pictures and make snarky Reddit posts for the rest of my life.

I'm just one of those people who can always tell the same story twice, forgetting that I've told it already.

I learned very early on in life that not everyone wants to hear every fact in the world, even if you want to tell them everything you've ever read.

There are definitely times - and I think this is pretty common among cartoonists - where you spend an entire day trying to think of an idea, and you're like, 'I give up.' And then you go and take a shower or run an errand, and halfway there, you get an idea.

The thing about the Internet is that you can write something... for a very narrow audience and make a living at it.

Lots of people in aggregate might know who I am, but they are spread around across the country and the world.

The nice thing about being on the Internet is that you're not as recognisable as someone that's been on TV.

I don't have hard numbers about this, but the impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble - it is almost insignificant.

I don't feel bad about the fact that I notice if a lot of people laugh at a comic, and think, 'That worked; I'll do things like that more.'

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.

I used to work at NASA in Virginia. It was nothing glamorous; I was just tasked with making code compile for obscure projects, and I wasn't very good at it. Now I spend most of my time drawing pictures and looking at funny things on the Internet, which in retrospect is largely what I did at my old job, too.