Quotes from John Hodgman

when you are shooting a television show, time is more important than any one performance. If you are doing a bad job at acting, I had learned, they will not bother to tell you. That would be a waste of time, and it might put you into an emotional hole that would also waste time. And by the same token, I had learned that when they say you have done a good job at acting, they are probably lying.

Now normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn't) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can't) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox News. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism

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

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.

It is a consuming knowledge, an overwhelming sadness for what is lost that makes enjoyment of the present impossible.

success does not mean you cannot be tricked.

For some people, status is what protects them from oblivion. And when they feel their status is slipping away from them, they act fearfully, irrationally.

There is little I like more than a steam tray full of breakfast sausages - ask anyone - and craft services is very good on this account.

the people of Maine have a punishing streak of self-hatred that makes Bostonians seem like lighthearted imps.

my mother, who could not have been smarter or more unselfish in life except in this one very specific area. I inherited her dumbness regarding cigarettes for the same dumb reason many dumbs do: it feels good, once it stops feeling terrible. And plus no one is ever going to die, so why not?

why is there no right-wing Daily Show? And we would glibly, pridefully answer that the conservative movement could not be funny because it was, by nature, authoritarian, prudish, untruthful, and dull.

the acting profession itself is precisely and endlessly this: waiting in a room for your name to be called. And then you hear your name, and they take you through the blank door into the room.

Single people who don't get pets in their twenties have to do other things to pretend they are grown-ups, like get married.

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.

You are sleeping and farting and snorting and flaking and puking in close proximity, and there is no way to hide all of these sounds and smells from your beloved. You see your partner unhinge their jaw to say the worst things, or shed their disgusting skin to become something new, and you have to accept and forgive these things. A marriage, like a python, is expensive.

cat's feelings, and neither do you. It is not your pet anymore. It is an asshole who lives with you.

Sometimes I feel as though I were a diver who had ventured a little beyond the limits of safe travel under the sea and had entered the strange zone where one is said to enjoy the rapture of the deep.

I told him there is no Words with Friends in this life: there is only Scrabble, with enemies.

And you are forced to say, No. I have to get back to my family. This is the most convenient time for me to have him poisoned. And you know you are a monster after all, a sick animal that no one has the decency to put down.

But even though we were all horrifying reminders of our own mortality, it was nice to see my old, crumbling friends.

All men, I think, wonder who the secret man that lives inside them is and whom they will meet in the mirror when they stop shaving. They wonder if that man is better than the one they know. If that elder sage or fantasy wizard or feral mountain man will be wiser than they, and when they are lost, if that dude will light up his staff and guide them through the dwarven mines and out of the wilderness.

I enjoy being seen and recognized. So many people go through life without being seen or recognized at all, not even by their own families. So I know what a gift it is.

I felt my brain change shape the way everyone's does when they first sit in first class. First there is disbelief and euphoria. You touch all the little seat-adjustment buttons and the sleeping masks and cozy socks and want to cry. You feel so lucky.

You may think it's enough to just read Val Kilmer's wine blog and drink whatever he recommends. And for the most part, you would be right. But sometimes Val Kilmer gets confused and drinks Thousand Island salad dressing, and so it's important to develop your own palate as well.