Chris hardwick quotes

I think because we're ourselves, we tend to think we're unique. 'I have problems that are just specific to me.' Then you connect with one of your parents and you realize, 'Oh yeah, we had all that stuff, too.' You're not that original. I mean, in a good way, because it makes you feel like you're connected and a part of the world and not an island.

Bowling is all physics and energy distribution. It's F = ma. So it is actually one of the most science-y sports, because it literally is just a ball and a surface and objects to knock down.

I think some of what makes it a good podcast is that it's organic. It doesn't feel forced. If we can say anything about ours, it's that we're not faking it at all. We're genuinely interested in the people that we're talking to.

My best friend, Wil Wheaton, identifies himself as a geek.

There are certain parts of a classic nerd's brain that can destroy that person - obsessing about things to the detriment of everything else in your life. But those are the same tools that you can use to turn everything around.

The nerds provide the toys that distract the morons. So the nerds are sort of the new drug-dealers. We're the drug dealers of the 21st century because we provide all the brain candy for the mouth-breathers, for lack of a better word.

Worry is a misuse of your imagination.

The goal of almost every comic is to find a comedy voice - a specific point of view that an audience can latch onto.

American television constantly tries to co-op British comedy and create their own version of it. Most of the time it doesn't work; obviously, in the case of 'The Office,' it did. But a lot of times, it doesn't really work.

No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person. Ever meet someone who's always had everything work out for them with zero struggle? They usually have the depth of a puddle. Or they don't exist.

It's very easy to attack ourselves. Even comforting in its familiarity, but you must resist this urge at all costs. Dwelling on the past or your perceived flaws will do nothing but keep you under emotional house arrest and hamper your progress. Commit yourself to growth and reward yourself with kindness for choosing to do so!

Trying to make strangers laugh is crazy and more than a little narcissistic.

With stand-up, there's a little bit of an exaggerated reality because things have to be manipulated to create comedy, to create jokes.

It's funny: when I first started getting vocal about how much I liked 'Doctor Who,' I didn't realize how deep the fan base was.

I feel like being nerd is not about the superficial quality; it's about how nerds approach life. It's much more emotional and mental than it is you're some fat guy living in your mom's basement, which I think is just a hacky stereotype.

My mom is a big sports fans. Basketball, football, baseball, whatever. She calls into sports radio shows and gets into shouting matches, that's how intense she is about it.

I dated around some, but I've always been a serial monogamist. I don't know how people date around a lot, and not want to stab themselves in the face with a sharp object.

If you're looking to freelance, just get as many gigs going as you can, and you can make it work... It's about getting as many side projects as possible, keeping as many balls in the air as you can, and what you're doing, basically, is diversifying your portfolio, with the same kinds of rewards. One falls through, and you still have another one to work on.

Twitter is basically text messaging. Twitter is a guy you can always elbow in the side and say, "Hey, look, a guy in a clown suit just threw up!" And I don't have 400-800 words to say about that, I just wanted to say that one thing.

I categorize nerds as creative-obsessive. A lot of nerds are creative people who obsess almost unnaturally over the minutiae of things.

If I wasn't acting or doing stand-up, I would be in animation. Or if I had the discipline I might studies physics.

Being constructively critical is good, as long as your purpose is to improve your methods for future endeavors. Lying in bed and replaying failures and telling yourself you're stupid is a tremendous disservice to your efforts and what you can offer the world.

As a comedy nerd, I get a lot out of the podcast because I'm genuinely interested in the people I'm talking to.

Every time I finish a record, it's sort of feels like, "I can't believe that I'm hanging out and having a conversation, and people are gonna listen to this." It's an odd thing, but it's really cool.

If you do a joke that's really old, then what happens is people on Reddit and Twitter just go, 'Real original, you're just doing old jokes!' But bands do it all the time.

Television and movies just take so long. If you pitch a show or develop a project, it can be a year before your show even gets on the air, if it gets picked up. Just the concept of "I had this idea" and within a week it was in the world, that was a part of why it felt weirdly empowering as a performer.

Like lycanthropy, the nerd gene can skip a generation. My maternal grandfather was a technophile.

I've been out of work so many times in my life that relying too much on just one job is terrifying.

The idea of the archetypal nerd is totally blurred these days. So many people of this current generation have grown up with technology and video games. It's just a part of the world now, a part of our shared culture.

Steal moments of happiness if you have to, and then collect them until they are the dominant images in your psyche.

I've seen nerdists make tributes to their obsessions out of Legos that are like works of art. It just goes to show you how pervasive this stuff has become in our culture. It really is an ideology that you can subscribe to now.

All television is an advertisement - that's why it exists. It wasn't the art-form first and then the commerce - it was that they could put on entertainment long enough to distract people into looking at products. It's for focusing people on advertising and separating you from money in some way. Some people forget that. The side product is that we get some great eye candy. TV is the best it has ever been right now. I don't have a problem with that since it's what keep us employed.

In the '90s, you couldn't say the word 'nerd' to someone when pitching a show. They would have considered that too niche and wouldn't have listened.

I think people have this stereotypical idea in their head of what a nerd is. People have said to me before, "You're not a nerd!" because I think they think of the classic Revenge Of The Nerds archetype.

No matter what tricks you use or what decisions you make, go easy on yourself as someone who's on a never-ending quest for improvement.

There's no ironic appreciation of things we love, even of things that are in fact ridiculous, which a hipster might take and own and show the world the humor in it.

You walk into a strip club with a wad of cash; they all flock around you. Strippers are just pigeons with tits. They go where the bread is.

Stand up straight. If you stand up straight, you will instantly feel better about yourself, and you will project a better image to the world, one that says you don't feel like you have to be hunched over and closed off.

I made a lot of changes in my life between my twenties and thirties, and it all sort of revolves around how I think people with nerdier brains tend to problem-solve and approach things differently then "norms."

I was very competitive growing up. I can't even play chess anymore because I used to play tournament chess in school. There's too much sense memory of sitting in front of a chess board and getting super intense about it. It's ruined the game for me.

I feel like so much of why I sort of want to work in television is so that people know to come see me live.

Things that are viral are things that motivate people to say I have to share this with everyone I know, and that has been more politics lately, and that's completely understandable.

I have opinions about the differences between Memphis barbecue and Texas barbecue. Put me in the kitchen and you'll see how Southern I can be.

Stand-up for me is usually a weekend thing. I go out of town and just do it.

I don't know if the podcast as a medium will ever have the cultural impact that TV and movies do. It may never be super-mainstream.

We will continue to address things, but in as much as I want to talk about politics as they are related to social media, I don't necessarily want to be a political show. I want it to cover everything, everything in our culture through social media, politics, pop culture, entertainment, science, everything.

Bowling really was a big American sport in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and then it kind of died off in the '80s.

Comic-Con is interesting because there's so much going on at once, it's literally impossible to do everything. You need clones and some sort of hoverboard so you can surf over the crowd of packed-in nerds.

I learned not to confuse 'busy' with 'productive,' but I'm still far too addicted to email to resist its early-morning digital snuggles.

I don't really read reviews and comments that much. There just isn't a lot to be gained from it.

We're not in an information age anymore. We're in the information management age.

Any time you're lucky enough to get on a show people watch, it's a good thing.

Real philosophy is like trying to read an alarm system installation manual in Korean.

I do lots of crowd work in my set, because I enjoy writing material through riffing and conversation.

There's a lot of laughing on a horror movie set. They're magical in that way.

When you hang around a lot of comedians long enough, you realize there's a certain gene, in every comedian. It's why we get hyper-analytical about things.

I've gone from being bullied by jocks as a kid to being bullied by nerds as an adult.

I do seem like the kind of guy who'd be obsessive about Rubik's Cubes.

Some people learn comedy, and some people just are comedy.

I think being an outcast is what sort of strengthens the nerd movement, because you're isolated, so you have time.

Even before I had an assistant, my calendar was color-coded and I had all these different e-mail rules for how to prioritize e-mails, so I made it a point years ago to figure all that stuff out because my life was a mess.

Every year on my birthday, I start a new playlist titled after my current age so I can keep track of my favorite songs of the year as a sort of musical diary because I am a teenage girl.

I think when I look out and I see there's so much negativity in the world and a lot of people are unhappy and a lot people are anxious, it just feels like that's one view of the world. But you don't have to always focus on that view of the world.

Comic-Con is nerd Christmas. People go wanting to have fun.

When you don't take an aggressive role in shaping your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, you become a helpless passenger floating through the universe like a ghost ship, merely reacting to wherever it takes you.

I love the South. Although I grew up primarily in Memphis, my family moved around a ton when I was a kid. I guess I never stayed in one place long enough to pick up the accent, but I definitely identify as a Southerner.

I think doing the podcast may have been one of the best career decisions I've ever made in my life.

We are in niche consumption mode, but 'niche' doesn't mean 'small' anymore. Niche can mean focused, and particularly with the Web, which is a global audience you can have something niche and still get 10 to 15 million views.

There's something about shooting webs out of my wrists and climbing up things that just makes me happy.

When I was growing up, I was as socially outcast as any nerd could possibly be. I was in the chess club, I brought D&D stuff to school, I had every game system you could imagine, I spent countless hours at arcades, computer camp, loud presence in the Latin Club. All that stuff.

I spent a lot of time bowling as a kid, mostly because I grew up in bowling alleys. They were kind of my playgrounds.

I'm not fun to bowl with. I take it way too seriously. I have high expectations for myself.

I almost think of nerd brains as rattlesnake venom; like, you can milk it. You can milk the pulpy venom out of the nerd brain and use it for good if you want to.

The nerdist movement is less about consumers; there is a large contingent that are creative nerdists instead of consumers.

Both my parents recognized early on that I wanted to do something in comedy, and they were really supportive. They're the ones who bought me Steve Martin records and let me watch R-rated comedies long before they probably should have.

We're gonna have fun, god***it!

Nerdists, unlike nerds, tend to be creators as much as consumers. They're creative consumers.

Humans cannot produce viable offspring with our closest animal cousin: the chimpanzee. We cannot impregnate a chimp. So you know what that means? No condoms.

You don't need 30 million people to listen to your podcast. If 10,000 people listen to your podcast, which is not a hard number to achieve, then 10,000 people are listening, and you can build a community, and literally change the world just recording into a microphone.

Twitter is really a hyper-distilled version of how the internet should work - short bursts of relatively useful information.

While the liberal media elite depict the bowler as a chubby guy with a comb-over and polyester pants, the reality is that bowling is one of the most tech-heavy sports today. Robotic pinsetters and computerized scoring were just the beginning.

I probably get one or two days off every five or six weeks.

I'm just gonna do a podcast because it's mine, I can control it, I have complete responsibility over it, and no one can touch it.

If you're able to build from your falls you'll be unstoppable and damn near fearless. You see, every time you fall down and get back up, you add another piece of body armor to yourself. You learn what not to do, how to do better, and how to create comfort through practice.

I hate to say it, but because of humanity's capitalistic nature, money is important.

I've always had a fondness for that satirical, Terry Gilliam - esque evil corporate megastructure, the kind of business that hangs banners that say making your life better as it throws kittens into the gears.

I would say that nerds, as a rule, are much more sexually active than the average person. There's a lot of anxiety and stress in the nerd brain, so sex is good for that.

Be offended by everything or be offended by nothing.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, it took effort to be a nerd. You had to seek out the nerd stuff.

Comment threads are the new therapy for people. They just go and post the worst things they can think of because they feel bad, and then other people start attacking them, and then they attack back.

Don't tell television, but there is some superior programming being made on the Interwebz.

Just as someone who's been interested in radio and programming for so long, I can usually tell when an interviewer is doing a segment just to fill a programming slot. They ask questions, but they don't care about the answers.

When I was younger, my parents used to say, "Trust us on this. We have more experience than you." And I was like, "Shut up, you don't know anything!" But I was an idiot. They did know more stuff because they'd experienced more things.

Comedy has sort of been my life-long obsession. I literally obsessed over comedy. I really didn't play sports - for me it was just comedy, computers and chess club; those were my big things.

Fleetwood Mac is just one of my all-time favorite bands.

Obviously, we went after Trump quite a bit, but I also feel like, we can't be on anyone's side, really. We need to be on comedy's side, so we need to be fairly going after everyone, because the entire political system is a circus. So it's been fun and interesting, and I hope people enjoy the evolution of the show. It'll continue to evolve because you can't do the same show forever. I feel like people would get bored with that.

I had a personal blog, but why does anyone care that I went shopping for hats?

When you look at your freelance career, it's really like a mall. And if you look at a mall, it's a self-contained system that has a flow and logic to it. You'll probably have one or two really bigger jobs, those are like your anchor stores.

I like listening to people talk about things that they love. They get to express things they don't normally get to express.

We just make stuff that we think is funny and fun, and I think that's the most you can do. I think if you're chasing virality, it just feels desperate.

You can't throw money at the Internet to make it work - it really is all about the quality of the content.

When comedians get successful, the fans that they have aren't the fans they would hang out with. I don't have that problem.

I don't know why people don't want to talk about their numbers. I guess in a sense, there's a bit of performer nudity, a bit of ego nudity when you expose your numbers, I guess because someone's are higher or someone's are lower. I've never really talked about the numbers with anyone, so maybe I'm not supposed to.

I just feel like, for me personally, there's just been so much election fatigue, and while I think it was very important during the election to always be on top of everything that was going on with the election via social media, I do feel like, all right, now we need a little bit of a detox. I think people need a little bit of a break from it.

When I was in school, if you wanted a computer, you had to build one. But today, computers are everywhere. We're all obsessed with technology and having the latest gadgets. Nerd culture is ubiquitous.

If you're going into stand-up, you're hyper-analyzing the world and asking as many questions about a thing as you possibly can so you can figure out the ultimate nature of that thing.

As someone who's very nerd-minded, whenever I see a lot of cross-platform stuff when I get bonus material on either side, then it makes me want to dive deeper, sort of like tearing apart the different pieces of the pie.

One of the many reasons why I love stand-up so much is when you're performing, you get instant feedback. You know if stuff is working right away.

I think for a lot of people, bowling is sort of a joke. But I love it, and it means a lot to me, so any chance to help promote it or celebrate it or not make the hackiest jokes - 'Bowlers are like plumbers and they wear the craziest shirts!' - I'm way into.

What's more unnerving than magnetism, ghosts, and unpurified water? Gadgetmongers who purport to protect us from metaphysical monsters that go bump in the New Age night.

There's a lot of money being generated by nerds right now. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, the list goes on and on. Nerds make more money than our government. And with money comes power.

I'm fascinated by people's process. Everyone's process is a little bit different, and just to see the different paths that people take to get where they are is really interesting to me.

A big company is like trying to steer a luxury liner.

I honestly think hipsters eat with their assholes because they consume everything wrong.

We didn't understand irony yet in the '80s; we just kind of existed at face value, so there was no nerd cool yet because the digital revolution was still in its infancy.

If you have the opportunity to try different things, you should try different things and step outside your comfort zone and see what works and what doesn't work.

If you can build your career around your passions, then you're winning in life; that's one of the best things you can ask for.

I think the mistake a lot of people make with new media is they just focus on one thing. But any one thing - just doing podcasts or just having a website or just doing television - isn't enough anymore.

I really don't have time "to Twitter," it's not something that should grab your day. That's a big misconception, actually, about the whole service. You don't go out of your way to tweet, you just post when you've got something. Hopefully, not while you're driving. It complements your life more than takes over your life.

I don't know if I'm a Twitter addict. That seems kind of harsh. I would say it's more that I'm seriously involved. That it's a long-term relationship - like a girlfriend, which my actual girlfriend loves to hear.

I played tournament chess from fifth grade up into high school.

If you have laser-like brain it's not always focused on the most productive things. If you want to play Halo: Reach all day, that's fine, but if you want to accomplish some other things, here are some ways to do that using your innate nerd gifts.

I am a freelancer. My services are available to anyone at any time.

Stand-up isn't something I just sit down and start writing - it's ideas you come up with in the shower, while you're driving, waiting in line.

Any nerd who grew up around the time that I did, BBC programming was a treasure chest for us.