John Hodgman

My career as a magazine writer was largely prefaced on the idea of curiosity, to go on adventures and weasel my way into the lives of people that I admire.

What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum! That's an amusing relic of our past.

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.

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.

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.

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

My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.

I know nothing about letting go.

Publishers, editors, agents all have one thing in common, aside from their love of cocktail parties. It's an incredible taste and an ability to find and nurture authors.

People who run for president seriously and people who become president enter a bizarre secret society in which they have had an experience that none of us will ever have.

When I listen to music - I don't particularly do it for fun all that much. It's not a big part of my life, and I'm not really on top of what's happening in the world of music in the way I was when I was a teenager.

While I understand that all things must come to an end, whether it's a television advertisement or one's life or the world itself, it doesn't make it any easier to deal with.