Chris Thile Quotes

I get around OK with a toolbox. As a kid, I picked up skills following my dad through the oil fields of Oklahoma and West Texas. My wife Janine is hard to impress, but she does think it's cool when I fix things around the house.

I'm not handy.

In my mind, I am extraordinarily handy. But what that means is when I attempt to fix something, there's usually a five-minute period of experimentation, followed by a five-minute period of frustration, followed by a frantic phone call to a professional.

I do change the odd lightbulb, and I fix the Internet when it goes down, because it's something I am really good at.

I like fixing things.

Oh, I wish I could tell you I was a Mr. Fix-It, but I am not that kind of guy. I get frustrated so easily.

It sucked to make my own CDs. I'm bad at that. It sucks to figure out how to power my amp. I don't know that stuff.

I started to learn some common sense. Even just sort of day-to-day things. I started to cook a little bit more and try to learn to fix things around the house. If something breaks down, rather than call a guy, there's got to be more I can do.

I'm starting to feel like I can actually figure out how stuff works. I can actually pick stuff apart and have a chance of fixing it.

[In my home workshop,] generally I'm mending things, which is interesting because you learn a lot about why they broke.

When I was four or five years old, my grandfather showed me how to build things, paint, saw. Through years of fixing bikes, repairing lawn mowers, I learned how things work.

I'm awful with directions, and I'm not very handy around the house.

I was focused on building things from an early age. When I was about 3, our toilet broke, and my mother was ready to call the plumber. I told her I would fix it and asked her to get my Richard Scarry book 'How Things Work in Busytown.' Between the picture of a toilet and the text she read to me explaining how the parts worked, I fixed it.

I can change a light fixture, and I can do certain things. But I'm really bad in terms of construction. I can't do any of it on my own.

Tinkering is something we need to know how to do in order to keep something like the space station running. I am a tinkerer by nature.

I'm one of those guys who likes to piddle around in the garage and fix stuff.

I won't date a guy who doesn't own a toolbox. I'm not saying you need to be able to knock down a wall or build a house or anything like that. But I've been out with a couple of guys who didn't own toolboxes, and they couldn't even change a light bulb.

I am a mechanical techie. I can build things with my hands.

I have no interest in a guy who doesn't know the right end of a screwdriver.

My mom and dad had a store, and sometimes people would return broken stuff. I'd take it apart and reassemble it. At 16, I really understood the architecture of things.

The only thing I knew how to do without a lot of money was repairing tools. I actually started making and repairing tools for machines.

I really enjoyed working on a building site. I also worked for a couple of months in a mobile phone repair shop. That just wasn't me.

I've always been interested in mechanical things. I think I must have been heavily influenced by my father, who is also very good with his hands. He liked to build things. I always loved to watch him do it, and I loved to build things on my own.

Marriage and fatherhood heighten the disillusion that we all think we are born handy. We confidently believe that we can fix things around the house, as if it's part of the collective brain that was further enhanced by eighth-grade shop class.

I was at a speaking engagement for MIT... and I said, 'The Professor has all sorts of degrees, including one from this very institution [MIT]! And that's why I can make a radio out of a coconut, and not fix a hole in a boat!'