John Quotes

Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war. If anything, we use war as a metaphor for sports.

I think in American culture, we put value on economic success but tell people you don't have to be economically successful to be happy.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Most people presume my mustache is not real because it's much darker than my regular hair.

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.

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

That which is hard to do is best done bitterly.

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.

When a good friend gives you his or her book, you don't want to read it, because you're afraid that it's not going be what you hope it can be.

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

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

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

Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.

I had the pleasure of listening to Rickie Lee Jones' Flying Cowboys album on audio cassette, which had just come out at that time because I am an elderly man.

Well, I always had this desire to celebrate and somehow be a part of things that I thought were really great.

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.

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

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.

People like what they like. They're gonna do what they're gonna do.

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

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

The few people who ask to have their photographs with me, I almost always say yes, except for a few circumstances, like when my family is around.

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.

Everything we make in life, eventually, is sold for a dollar or a penny or given away.

My fame is due to broadcast television.

I believe that the federal government should be laying down broadband like Eisenhower laid down interstates.

There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.

My memories of literary agenting are of a very happy time and there are surprising reminders of it coming back now.

I know nothing about letting go.

My candidacy is a compelling argument for my candidacy. I want to be President.

I don't watch television. And certainly not ads; I loathe advertising.

I think for the foreseeable future, the truth is going to be awful and funny all at the same time.

I suspect that when the truth ceases to be heartbreakingly funny, we will be in a better place and a happier society over all.

Only the nerds will save the earth.

The reality is that there is an enormous value to gut-check instinctive decision-making in the world that is not hampered by reams and reams of research and complexity.

I naturally own a lot of very old magazines. And I enjoy going to old magazines because the advertisements in those magazines tended to have thousands of words of copy in them.

I don't wish to brag, but I'm very intelligent.

Panic is an incredibly catalyzing creative force. And almost out of sheer necessity, I found I had to talk about myself and my real life as it is effectively lived by me.

Sports is a bloodless rehearsal of confrontation, and everyone shakes hands or high fives or fist bumps at the end to show that everything is okay.

I used to enjoy the anonymity of being a literary figure and occasionally a public radio figure.

I'm not a particularly religious person, but that feeling of getting transmissions from someplace else, even if it's from your own consciousness, is very, very real. To me, at least.

So much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.

I am a marginally employed person who can escape with my school teacher wife to the waters of Maine for much of the summer.

Maine's motto is "Vacationland," but as far as I'm concerned, it should be, "Maine: Putting the 'spite' in hospitality since 1820."