Quotes from Ken Jennings

Being a nerd really pays off sometimes.

It's boring to have the same guy win. I'm actively rooting against myself.

Even before you understand them, your brain is drawn to maps.

When you see people who are really good at game shows, the one common attribute is a cool head under pressure: an ability to perform as well in the studio, surrounded by lights and noise, as you do on your couch.

Sure I have a cell-phone, so I don't have to remember everyone's number anymore, but that really wasn't a core part of my brain.

For some reason the most devoted mapheads seem to be kids.

It's really changed me. For the first time I'm in favor of the Bush tax cuts.

You watch an old 'Jeopardy!' and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry,' or 'Movies,' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now, though, there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.

If I start outsourcing all my navigation to a little talking box in my car, I'm sort of screwed. I'm going to lose my car in the parking lot every single time.

For me, it started as a child with one of those little wooden jigsaw maps of the U.S., where's there's crocodiles on Florida and apples on Washington state. That was my very first map.

People are using GPS systems to find millions of little hidden objects throughout the world - often as simple as a piece of Tupperware hidden in the woods. You go to a website, you get the latitude and longitude to get the specific location of a certain specific hiding space, and then you go there and see if you can find it.

I have condemned my kids to a lifetime of geographic illiteracy.

I always bring my kids vacation souvenirs printed in Comic Sans, so they know I love them but not unconditionally.

If it's on the Internet, then it's gotta be true.

Knowing lots of answers but being a millisecond slow on the buzzer is indeed very frustrating.

It's so much fun that the money is just icing on the cake. There seems to be a lot of icing.

There's just something hypnotic about maps.

During the whole 'Jeopardy' experience, I felt like I was living a bit of a double life, I would be secretly flying out to L.A. to tape new shows, hoping that none of my coworkers would notice the absence and figure out what was going on. 'Jeopardy' tries very hard to keep their secrets.

You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America.

If I start outsourcing all my navigation to a little talking box in my car, I'm sort of screwed. I'm going to lose my car in the parking lot every single time.

When you see people who are really good at game shows, the one common attribute is a cool head under pressure: an ability to perform as well in the studio, surrounded by lights and noise, as you do on your couch.

You watch an old 'Jeopardy!' and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry ' or 'Movies ' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now, though, there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.

To a nation of grandparents nostalgic for a time when everyone listened to Toscanini on the radio, tired of having to watch people on TV win money for bungee jumping and eating goat rectums, Jeopardy! is sweetly cerebral relief piped in straight from the Eisenhower era, a time capsule from ana age before America dumbed down.

Trivia is mainstream. 'Nerd' is the new 'cool.