John Hodgman Quotes

I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing.

Every new invention is like a baby. You think it may cure cancer or become the president, but in the end, you're happy it just stays out of jail.

Everyone asks, Will he make it, will she make it? You never make it.

You never know how things are going to go. I think you hope that people are going to dig what you do and that you're going to get the chance to do it on a really comfortable level.

My dream was, and always had been, to write a book. To be a writer.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

When I started out, I didn't know if I was ever going to make a movie.

I have many goals, but I don't know if they are going to come true.

There are things you want to do, but you can't really look at the future. You don't know how much there is.

'Some day,' I said, 'I will be an author.'

I have great stories. I am going to write a book.

Every book takes you to the terror, that terrible place of possible failure.

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea.

If you really want a prize, or if you really want applause, you should try to write as many books as humanly possible.

Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. I never know how successful a movie is going to be - when you make a movie you're always hoping for the best.

You can work on a movie for years, and you won't know until you show it to an audience for the first time if it makes any sense to them at all, if they're touched, if they find it funny, so it's endlessly exciting, because failure is just right there all the time, and your chances of success don't rise that much based on the fact that you succeeded last time.

What man would dare believe that all he planned might come to pass?

You write a book and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shores. And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the right person.

How much hope, expectation, and sheer hard work goes into the smallest success! There is no being sure of anything except that whatever has been created will change in time.

The writer is one who, emnbarking upon a task, does not know what to do.

I've done far too many things that I felt were going to be genius that weren't and I've done some things that I didn't think were going to be much that really connected with people. So expectations are left at the door. But hope exists all the time.

I would say [I love] writing, because lately I've been finishing my book.

He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws.

Every song that I start to write, I wonder if I'll be able to write it.