Great Throughts Treasury

"A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference."

"A lot of media that that I want to consume, I don't want to have to own forever and ever. It's not like real estate."

"A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime."

"All I can ask from society is that it please stop telling me why I should like sports."

"All books should be trilogies; I mean I think we all agree on that."

"Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war. [on soccer]"

"Any time you try to create an Internet meme, automatic fail. That's like the worst thing you can do."

"And parents, some old fashioned kitchen wisdom for dealing with those lice: take your child and cover his hair with mayonnaise and shove him outside because he disgraced your house by bringing lice into it."

"As a freelance writer, I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things."

"As you know, the thing that I know the least about is the topic of sports."

"Comedy does offer an avenue to television and film careers for untelegenic people that great drama does not."

"Creating fake facts does require a measure of haphazard research, insofar as they need to not just be possible, but also interesting."

"Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it."

"First of all, I wish I could grow a beard."

"Comics have a problem, and that is continuity - the obsession with placing the characters in an existing world, where every event is marked in canon. You're supposed to believe that these weepy star boys of now are the same gung-ho super teens fighting space monsters in the '60s, and they've only aged perhaps five years."

"For the first time in history, well-educated, affluent, white males are going to have their say."

"For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind."

"Generally speaking, I think it is fair to say that I am a friend to the creatures of the Earth when I am not busy eating them or wearing them."

"Generally speaking, I, like anyone else who does anything publicly, like it when people like what I do, and would like to hear as much."

"Here's the thing: I am not only a creature of civilization, I'm an asthmatic person. I will only live so long as I have stockpiled the proper inhalers. I'm effectively a cyborg. You know how in Jurassic Park, they bred those dinosaurs with the lysine deficiencies, so if they ever got off the island, they'd die? That's me."

"Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he could do."

"Hosting a TV show is a full-time job in which success is defined by it never ending."

"I am amused by cricket because it seems to take longer than baseball and I like that. It seems like a sport I could have made up it - it takes several days to play and everyone wears sweaters. I can't confess to knowing what's going on at all."

"How to Win a Fight - Step 1: Always make eye contact. Step 2: Go ahead and use henchmen - these days it's unnecessary and frowned upon to fight your own battles, especially with so many henchmen out of work. Step 3: Run lots of attack ads - I have run about 500 attack ads this year, and I expect that I will buy even more air time next year, because my enemies are getting stronger."

"I actually own a copy of my own book; that's how dedicated I am as an author."

"I am not an Internet superstar."

"I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to 'truthiness.'"

"I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated."

"I feel that there is a decision people make to either engage in a legitimately ridiculous process to get your kid into school, or choose not to engage in that so much, and end up finding a nice local school that fits."

"I know electric knives are excellent for carving turkeys that have had their bones removed and been forced into a mold to shape them. Please note that those turkeys are called hams."

"I know nothing about letting go."

"I Know you are asking: What if I am wrong?"

"I have learned that newborn infants roll their eyes around and move their heads and their arms in short jerky spasms. And if you homeschool them, they will stay this way forever."

"I have a lot of cultural references that have amassed in my brain like shrapnel over the years that are meaningful to me."

"I still have a fondness for books. Many a time I will be antiquing, and I'll say, 'What's that old-timey curio over there? What is that, a candlestick telephone, one of those old pull-chain toilets? Oh no, it's a book. I used to help make those things! I will buy it and use it to decorate my chain of casual family-dining restaurants."

"If you have not seen it, FOOTBALL is a game in which men shove one another back and forth for no reason. They do not choose how, when, or whom they shove. All that has been decided for them in advance. All they need to do is follow the orders given to them before the game, showing them where to run and how to violently deploy the meat of their bodies against the meat that is running at them. They are doing this in order to please one angry old man on the sidelines. This old man is called the coach or yelling surrogate dad who will never be happy."

"I think that obviously, there is a perverse attraction to a fundamentally changed world or the end of the world. There is a death wish, a perverse death wish. Not just for ourselves, not just for the movie 'Death Wish,' but for the end of all human life."

"I would be good for maybe not the center square but an upper square on 'Hollywood Squares.'"

"If you look in the dictionary under 'perfectionist,' you see Henry Selick correcting the definition of perfectionist in the dictionary. I mean, he is so meticulous."

"If you make the smokestacks out of children, who will you force to clean them?"

"Many people, many girls have tried to teach me the rules to football. And you would think that it would get in my head that way, but I just don't understand it."

"It?s been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica."

"In the '80s and '90s, I was really interested in, moved by, exhilarated by, and troubled by rap in all the ways a white person from Brookline, Massachusetts should be. That was music that was making trouble, and it was interesting and provocative trouble."

"Look at Dick Cheney. Financially he's obscenely wealthy, but he's clearly unhappy. I wouldn't be surprised if he's visited by no less than three ghosts a night."

"I'm a personality - like a George Plimpton who effectively plays himself in a bunch of different roles, or a Paul Lynde-type character."

"Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable."

"Like most experts, I've always defined a planet in common-sense terms: Can you beam down to it? Is it populated by green-skinned women? Would Galactus eat it for food?"

"It seems that every generation needs its public, tweedy, literary personality to sell its consumer electronics. To whatever degree I can live up to the Plimptonian legacy, I am humble and proud."

"It would be rather naive to imagine that Oprah doesn't have an Earth Evacuation Plan. You know Richard Branson does - his is in plain sight."

"Manly deeds, womanly hands."