Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares.
If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.
The universe is probably littered with one-planet graves
Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.
You don't use science to show you're right, you use science to become right.
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.
The scholarly authorities on freezing to death seem to be, unsurprisingly, Canadians.
It's amazing what's buried in old, poorly digitized PDFs hosted on some random professor's website.
A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.
Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.
The nice thing about being on the Internet is that you're not as recognisable as someone that's been on TV.
I'm just one of those people who can always tell the same story twice, forgetting that I've told it already.
Lots of people in aggregate might know who I am, but they are spread around across the country and the world.
I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.
The thing about the Internet is that you can write something... for a very narrow audience and make a living at it.
I think that putting merchandising into the hands of the artist themselves is one of the best things for the artist.
I read comics and I did science, and never really put them together until I accidentally found myself in the middle of one.
People in my world can be disdainful of political and social problems and solutions. But we're never going to stop needing those.
Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize its the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the world?
Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it's the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the world?
Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’
I think the weirdest question I've ever gotten was, 'If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes?'
I don't feel bad about the fact that I notice if a lot of people laugh at a comic, and think, 'That worked; I'll do things like that more.'
I love learning about the science that governs the universe around us and want to share the delight of discovering how things work and why.
There is a danger of building an identity around the idea of being smart because it is very easy to become off-putting, to become exclusionary.
But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.
I learned very early on in life that not everyone wants to hear every fact in the world, even if you want to tell them everything you've ever read.
You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.
I've always thought that one of the the great thing about physics is that you can add more digits to any number and see what happens and nobody can stop you.
When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex.
I'm sad that my childhood came just slightly before the lithium-ion-battery boom, because I would've killed for the cheap radio-controlled helicopters they have now.
I try not to spend too much time interpreting my comics for people, because I try to put out there whatever I can, and people can draw whatever conclusions they want.
The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I’ve ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.
A lot of the time, when I find myself critiquing scientific accuracy in movies, I have to remind myself that it had to get close enough to getting it right to get things wrong.
I don't have hard numbers about this, but the impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble - it is almost insignificant.
I have the standard cartoonist setup, which is one of those Cintiq tablets, and a laptop. If I'm mostly writing code, I'm on the laptop, and if I'm mostly drawing, I'm on the Cintiq.
Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they'll turn out.
One of the nice things about the Internet is you can do a comic that's just for Ph.D. students, or for truck drivers, and you get to reach all of them without having to satisfy the other 99%.
There are so many adventures that you miss because you're waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.
Google owns YouTube, and recently, I drew a comic about an idea for a YouTube feature - which they actually took seriously and implemented. So I'm thinking that maybe we'll have a future where Google is 'xkcd.'
A lot of people will refer to comics by number to me, and I'll realize they're expecting me to remember all the comics by number. And I can't even remember what I ate this morning, let alone which comic was #473!
An artist shouldn't be judged by how many people like his art but by how pure and good it is - but I think that when you're telling jokes, which is more what I'm doing, if people aren't laughing, you're telling bad jokes.
News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.
It used to be if you wanted to do a newspaper comic, you had to appeal to a pretty big chunk of the newspaper's readership for them to want to keep you around. 'Dilbert' would be office humor, but even that is pretty widely experienced.
One of the things I've learned with doing 'xkcd' is that you sort of give people, 'Here's the thing, and here's the button you can press to get another thing.' Sometimes that can be more easy to digest than, 'Here's a long page of things.
One of the things I've learned with doing 'xkcd' is that you sort of give people, 'Here's the thing, and here's the button you can press to get another thing.' Sometimes that can be more easy to digest than, 'Here's a long page of things.'
Once I got married, I started working from an office. I found that having somewhere to go that isn't my house is mentally helpful: 'This is the place where I answer email and write blog posts,' and 'over there is the place where I do the dishes.
It's tempting to just write a comic called 'Everyone Mail Randall Munroe Twenty Bucks' - maybe it would work, and I could just close down the 'xkcd' store and sit on a beach and draw pictures and make snarky Reddit posts for the rest of my life.
The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space-each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
Once I got married, I started working from an office. I found that having somewhere to go that isn't my house is mentally helpful: 'This is the place where I answer email and write blog posts,' and 'over there is the place where I do the dishes.'