A.J. Jacobs Quotes

Like, I'm hyper-conscious about going to bed on time, and doing my seven-step skin care routine at night.

I have a hard time watching people getting punched on screen; I have to close my eyes a lot.

While I love film and want to continue to pursue it 100 percent, my home is TV.

I feel like so often I'm just, like, running around and eating in the car, which is, like, not good, or eating as I'm walking down the street.

College is expensive; I always knew that, and I wanted to make money, partially to spend a little of it here and there, but primarily for a college savings fund.

I think when you have some success as a kid, your notion of being a good actor is pleasing the director, doing exactly what they tell you to do.

I'm a very law-abiding citizen, and I've never consciously broken any law. I get nervous just jaywalking in Los Angeles!

No actor wants to choose - they just want all of the options available to them all the time; we tend to be pretty greedy.

When you're shooting at 9 A.M. at a club, you have to use all of your acting skills.

It really does mean so much when your cast mates, who you respect so much, tell you that you made them laugh.

I don't like yelling insults at someone who's never done anything to me.

I think if I was in over 250 films, the world would get pretty sick of me. I would probably never get put in anything ever again.

There are these important things in some people's lives that can make you laugh even when you're going through a tough time or a stressful week.

My grandfather can barely even hear, and Chevy Chase makes a face, and he laughs.

My poor, problematic feet don't let me wear anything much over a three- or four-inch heel.

Thinking back about throwing myself at certain gentlemen that had no interest in me, that'll bring a blush to my face if I think about it too often.

There is a great degree of comfort with your family when you're on a TV show.

I've definitely run from the cops in the New York City subways.

As you become an adult and start to make your way in life, you realize how much your friends are your family - though you get to make fun of your friends, too.

I think we've probably all read a word that we've never heard pronounced out loud, and we try it out in a sentence and fall on our face.

A lot of people I went to college with felt like they wanted to pursue theater exclusively, so I don't think that I really was in competition with people that I went to school with.

They didn't really encourage my goofy, comedic side at Juilliard.

The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.

Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last day, for this new crime against him, as he called it; and as long as he had me in his power he kept his word

the higher the flame shoots the quicker it blacks out.

you can die of the wrong thought as quick as of a bullet.

The only way I can endure the future is to ignore it.

The hinge is distinctly different, so when you look at it carefully, you recognize that it is its own unique design.

At Linkabit, we put little effort and energy into patenting things.

I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.

People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.

I was so grateful to be independent of the academic establishment. I thought, how awful it would be to have my future hinge on such people and such decisions.

Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities.

The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.

One of our troubles is that we try to make municipalities that are totally different from each other all act as if they were the same kind of creature, with the same kinds of possibilities.

Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole

People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.

All my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens. They keep discovering new oil fields. The world is apparently floating in oil fields.

Empires want [cities] only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them.

It may be romantic to search for the salves of society's ills in slow-moving rustic surroundings, or among innocent, unspoiled provincials, if such exist, but it is a waste of time.

Americans don't really think that other places are as real as America.

[If Quebec became sovereign] there would be one level of government that would be missing, one less level of government. The municipality would become the second level.

Reactions [on my 1979 Massey lectures] were from Anglophones. I'm one. But I'm terrible at French. In fact, there was practically no reaction.

Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's shoulders. This is one of the terrible things about empires.

That was the fear that there would be no identity anymore, for Canada. It was foolish, because there are so many examples of separatism, and nothing has disintegrated, unless they went to war.

Maybe part of my animus against the English is the way they have always treated the Irish and they way they still think about the Irish.

Unfortunately [René] Lévesque had so little self confidence in Quebec and in the people themselves, that he fell for that and, yes, he'd say, you know, it might be ruinous for us economically.

[ René Lévesque] didn't understand why things do collapse. It's usually a very banal reason why things do collapse. It's not a grand reason, why they collapse economically, at least in the West.

Americans have got it so dinged into them that they are the most fortunate people on Earth, and that the rest of the world - the sooner it copies what America is like, the better.

I get absolutely ruthless in my own way about not doing anything else when I am trying to concentrate on writing a book. I have to stick to it and concentrate.