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 realized that we're now at a point of self-reference with the Internet culture that there's almost no there left, you know? It's important to make new things. It's important to make culture, rather than simply reference it. I love a good cultural reference, and it's one of the great joys in my life, but it has to all be in balance with the core job, which is to make something new. And that sort of brings me around to why I started talking about my fondness for marijuana.
We estimate that there are perhaps 20,000 prehistoric hunter-gatherers frozen up in those glaciers. Now, if they simply thaw and wander around, it's not a problem, but if they find a leader - a Captain Caveman, if you will - we'll be facing an even more serious problem.
I am someone who values knowledge, actual knowledge. I also value stories and fiction a whole lot, and that's where the fake knowledge comes in.
What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum! That's an amusing relic of our past.
I was always fascinated with the way that things pop on the Internet - the ways you build communities and create little stories and ideas that people play around with and send back to you.
I navigated the world as a hedge maze of constant fear and worry in which I might take the wrong turn and jeopardize the love of everyone around me and everyone on Earth. That's what I needed in order to survive.
As a live stand-up comedy performer, I have the benefit of choosing real entrance music.
First of all, I wish I could grow a beard.
Most people presume my mustache is not real because it's much darker than my regular hair.
Stories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.
My fame is due to broadcast television.
I am not an Internet superstar. I am, ironically perhaps, the most old media superstar of all time. My fame is due to broadcast television.
By the way, if I have my own cult of personality with my own geodetic dome in western Massachusetts, I will have a hurt yurt for anyone who crosses me.
To want to become the President is, I think, such a bizarre ambition that it is automatically deranging.
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.
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. 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 really wouldn't censor myself. But because it was on such a slower scale, I would throw things out, and I indulged the personal stuff as little flashes of truth. Little in-jokes for anyone who was paying particular attention.
One of the things about crowd work that's so exciting is when you discover a character in the audience who's interesting or funny, who you can vibe off of. If someone's got a weird job that you can make reference to throughout, or you can bring that person onstage - humiliate them, or celebrate them! You can put people in conversation with one another. The best is when something that they're doing can reflect back on something that you're doing.
When you think about it, the end of the world is a little bit like death: We all know it's going to come eventually, and as we get older, we feel we see the signs more and more distinctly.
Once you're out in a place where there's one sheriff for the county, people have to learn how to get along with each other and that means going to the dump illegally and dumping your garbage and hoping the guys don't call you on it and being terrified of this to your core until you realize after many years that the guys at the dump don't really care where your garbage is coming from.
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.
Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies.
You know the old saying: "History is written by the winners. And also, the team of hand-picked historians that the winner keeps hidden away in an underground bunker".
Comedy does offer an avenue to television and film careers for untelegenic people that great drama does not.
Terry Gross. I would rush home from high school to listen to Terry Gross.
So much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.
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.
More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross; but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective, that is all that writing is about.
I have an unfortunate compulsion. I really would rather not do it, as it is very nerve-wracking and un-fun. But when it works, there is nothing like it.
I would be good for maybe not the center square but an upper square on 'Hollywood Squares.'
I don't know if you've ever been shoved into the bow of a nutshell pram, a boat that is very easily almost liftable with one hand, and quite tippy, and is being piloted by a 12-year-old, but it is the true feeling of having your life in someone else's hands, and it's very precarious.
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.
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.
As you know, the thing that I know the least about is the topic of sports.
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.
My type of humor is me not caring whether people know what I'm talking about or not.
Just a small-scale cult of personality, maybe raise a geodetic dome out in western Massachusetts and make people wear jumpsuits and give all their possessions to me.
A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.
My hope when I wrote the first book was that I would get to do it again. But it was not entirely clear that that would happen.
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.
I would say aside from Moxie soda bottles and Masonic artifacts, there's nothing I really collect.
One can always come up with funny lists and jokes. You know what? I take it back. Not everyone can always come up with funny lists and some jokes. I'm very lucky to have a gift where I can do that pretty ably.
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.
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.
Hosting a TV show is a full-time job in which success is defined by it never ending.
Lies are just another kind of storytelling, but with the very distinct and enlivening motive of desperation. Since writers are by nature desperate creatures, they usually do a pretty good (or pretty awful, but always interesting) job of lying.
You are only pretentious if you are not sincere.
Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.
My whole creative career is a product of the Internet. ...I'll take that back. To some degree. My fascination with cultural esoterica and trivia and so on was well-formed long before I got my first AOL account.
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.
The fact is I'm very self-similar.
Well, I always had this desire to celebrate and somehow be a part of things that I thought were really great.
When you're sitting down and you're blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you're channeling something else.
When you're a young person, you are biologically driven to believe you are immortal, and that's why you engage in all kinds of risky behavior you stop once you feel death's cruel breath on your neck. I think that as a straight white man in particular, I was tempted to believe that I was immortal and eternal because, after all, in this culture, straight white dudes are the heroes of every story that you see or read about with very rare exception. So how could the story go on without the hero, you know?
Even in my own life, there are memories I have that are difficult to explain - happenings that are so odd and unaccountably weird, that it is difficult to imagine they were not the result of prolonged and frequent contact with aliens throughout my life.
You wouldn't want to live a life in which you are loved or approved by all people on Earth or even within your own geodetic dome full of your jumpsuited followers.
I believe that the federal government should be laying down broadband like Eisenhower laid down interstates.
I am not an Internet superstar.
I say, if you're going to eat a creature alive, you have to expect some screaming. That is the carnivore's burden.
My candidacy is a compelling argument for my candidacy. I want to be President.
A stopped clock is correct twice a day, but a sundial can be used to stab someone, even at nighttime.
What I collect? Interesting jobs. Always to my thrill and excitement, but ultimately to my exhaustion, I collect interesting jobs. If an interesting job comes along, I take it; that's why I do so many things. I'm lucky to be able to.
The villain of any story is often the most compelling character.
I think that by the time I start writing the third book, of course, I will be President Of The United States, and that also will have something to do with it. I'll probably have to acknowledge that somehow.
I know nothing about letting go.
I believe that by releasing "passing interest/low keepsake-value literature" from the burden of physicality, you are actually releasing the words from their worst liability: the price and inconvenience of actual bookness.
Life may be miraculous in its unlikelihood in the universe, but it would be a fallacy to suggest that its rareness makes it inextinguishable.
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.
This is something that the nimblest standup comedians learn, over time, to handle gracefully. They'll go between prepared material, then they'll respond to what's happening in the room and weave it back into the prepared material and so on.
The understanding that we reach a point where we stop becoming something and start ending as something. That comes at different times in different points in different people's lives, and obviously there are lots of people who experience the presence of death much more keenly and much earlier than I did. But we all come to grips with it eventually.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tonally, there was no discussion; I just don’t know any other way to do it. I don’t want to make people feel bad, and I don’t want to make their problems into a joke. I do love telling people when they’re right and wrong, but for the most part, it was always going to be about real fights where people have a real difference of opinion and a real dispute. I want to make jokes, but I also want to make a decision that is fair.
It's not a secret family like I have a beautiful, gorgeous wife in Tokyo; I have another mom and dad. I'm the kid and I have another mom and dad in Atwater Village, Los Angeles.
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 have a lot of cultural references that have amassed in my brain like shrapnel over the years that are meaningful to me.
Reality, while generally probable, is not always interesting.
This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.
I don't wish to brag, but I'm very intelligent.
A literary agent is nothing but a cheap salesman (or woman); while a writer is a cheap salesman (or woman) who also has to actually write the books.
Specificity is the soul of narrative.
I actually own a copy of my own book; that's how dedicated I am as an author.
My favorite season is autumn, and Maine is lovely for that reason. In Maine, autumn begins on July 29. That's when you start building a fire in the fireplace and the leaves literally start falling from the trees. It is a cold and rugged and a beautiful place that reminds you with its many death traps - its painfully cold oceans, its sharp, jagged beaches, and perilous cliffsides - that nature doesn't care whether you live or die.
I am not a villain.I'm an only-child narcissist monster, but I wish no ill, nor do I wish for world domination; what a hassle that would be!
I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to 'truthiness.'
I used to enjoy the anonymity of being a literary figure and occasionally a public radio figure.
The very idea that there is no truth, but only the filter of narrative through which truth is invented is something I learned at the feet of the most leftist professors at Yale and am learning again from Sarah Palin during the Vice Presidential debate, and I find that very disorienting.
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.
Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it.
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.
There is no ritual that enhances creativity other than just starting.
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.
That which is hard to do is best done bitterly.
I had some very, very fond memories of the people I worked with and the authors I worked with - and I won't mention any names - but as I have been traveling through rural Maine over the past few weeks, one of my favorite things to do is to go into bookstores on the side of rural routes and paw through the old copies of Tom Clancy and Trevanian books they have in there for weird old 1970s thrillers that I haven't read yet.
Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war. If anything, we use war as a metaphor for sports.
Any time you try to create an Internet meme, automatic fail. That's like the worst thing you can do.
This is not to say there are not Chicagoans. But I would suggest that they are a nomadic people, whose lost home exists only in their minds, and in the glowing crystal memory cells they all carry in the palms of their hands: a great idea of a second city, lit with life and love, reasonable drink prices at cool bars, and, of course, blocks and blocks of bright and devastating fire.
I suspect that when the truth ceases to be heartbreakingly funny, we will be in a better place and a happier society over all.
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.
I am someone who values truth - actual truth as opposed to "truthiness." I am also someone who has been trained in deconstruction in the literary theory department of Yale University, so I am someone who is tempted to believe that no absolute truth is possible.
I'm not sure if that answers the question and I have absolutely no problem with any major world religion on Earth.
People like what they like. They're gonna do what they're gonna do.
You know, I began my life as a creative person writing true things for magazines and telling some very honest, straightforward personal essaying for This American Life, but until someone forces you, with a deadline, to really observe your life - unless you're motivated to do it yourself - there's so many stories that you miss.
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.
Anyone of conscience could come look at my book and see it as an esoteric oddity or be intrigued by it. It could happen either way on a thousand different little decisions each individual might make.
The reality is that if you want to be in a reality-based community, you've got to respect reality and that means calling it bad when you see the past ahead and it doesn't look good and acknowledging when it's going to work.
I'm a personality - like a George Plimpton who effectively plays himself in a bunch of different roles, or a Paul Lynde-type character.
So I am a product of the Internet, and to some degree a product of this sensibility of constant cultural reference.
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.
That catharsis is really the core of the incredibly personal comedy of Louis C.K. or Marc Maron or whatever. And look - I find it fascinating that I'm sitting here talking about some of these things, and not to low tones, and my kids are in the other room. I have to trust that if they hear what I'm saying and they have questions about it, I'll be able to answer it, and that's fine. But that's part of the scariness of it - the reality of opening up my own life and my own feelings.
All I can ask from society is that it please stop telling me why I should like sports.
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.
There is no metaphor for death. All comparisons are odious, but I'll do one anyway. We all have these moments of harsh clarity where we realize that something is gone, whether that is youth, whether that is someone we care about, whether that is where we literally lose someone we care about to death. Or we end a relationship that we thought would last forever, or have one ended for us. We all have these moments in life where it seems impossible to fill up the time that we have left for us, and yet we have to do it somehow.
I think there are very few invisible musical instrument players out there who can claim the chops and sheer perseverance of Björn Türoque, the world's perennial second-place air guitar champion. Whoever this Dan Crane might be, he's captured the mad, seductive spirit of the arbitrary skill contest perfectly, and rocks it hard into the hot Finnish night. There is no number of umlauts that do this Jekyll and Hyde of air-rocking justice.
The nice thing about live performance is that I've never, ever been let down. Partly I'm lucky that my audience self-selects itself. Generally they know what they're in for, and generally we all just like each other and get along. But I always find one or two or a dozen really interesting people in the audience who make the show different. And that's one of the things I really like about performing.
There's a tradition in American fiction that is deadly serious and earnest - like the Steinbeckian social novel.
John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald meet in hell and team up to assassinate Satan.
We have all been empowered by the web: everyone with a keyboard can now effectively broadcast to a national audience. In a sense, it puts each of us on the same footing as the major media conglomerates, except for AOL, who now apparently own all our thoughts and teeth.
Writing for me always requires trickery. Tricking myself into sitting down, letting words tumble out until you find the good ones. It's sort of a trance. And when a piece is done, I have little memory of how I wrote it, and zero confidence I'd ever be able to do it again.
Creating fake facts does require a measure of haphazard research, insofar as they need to not just be possible, but also interesting.
For many years, people would say, "Only child? Must have been terrible," and I wanted to say, "You are mentally ill, because it was the greatest." You got all the attention. You never had to share anything. No one ever ate your food. No one ever took your toys. But the unintended consequence was that I didn't appreciate that being universally loved was not only not required for happiness, but also not possible.
All books should be trilogies; I mean I think we all agree on that.
