Top 66 Quotes & Sayings by Randall Munroe

Some of the first infographics I did started off as notes to myself: trying to plot out, for instance, how IP addresses are allocated. After a while, I thought, 'This is a neat thing I can share with people, and they can follow me along in that process of understanding.'

Lots of people in aggregate might know who I am, but they are spread around across the country and the world.

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 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.

People in my world can be disdainful of political and social problems and solutions. But we're never going to stop needing those.

I have always had trouble paying attention. When I was supposed to be at work, I'd be doodling. But then when I was home, trying to draw, I would be working on math problems. I never end up doing exactly what I should be doing at at any given time.

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!

There are definitely times - and I think this is pretty common among cartoonists - where you spend an entire day trying to think of an idea, and you're like, 'I give up.' And then you go and take a shower or run an errand, and halfway there, you get an idea.

I used to work at NASA in Virginia. It was nothing glamorous; I was just tasked with making code compile for obscure projects, and I wasn't very good at it. Now I spend most of my time drawing pictures and looking at funny things on the Internet, which in retrospect is largely what I did at my old job, too.

I'm just one of those people who can always tell the same story twice, forgetting that I've told it already.

The thing about the Internet is that you can write something... for a very narrow audience and make a living at it.

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

What people don't appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls. Most humans probably couldn't manage it, and they've had a lifetime of practice at walking without falling over.

A lot of times, the idea of a comic will be, 'Wouldn't it be cool if you...' But instead of doing it, I'll draw a comic about it.

The nice thing about being on the Internet is that you're not as recognisable as someone that's been on TV.

It's amazing what's buried in old, poorly digitized PDFs hosted on some random professor's website.

Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it's the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the world?

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.

I have no artistic training - as you might have guessed from all the stick figures! - and there are a few things I have a really hard time drawing. I think the one that comes up the most is airplanes. Big airliners have such a weird wing shape, and I always have to redraw them 20 times before they're even recognizable.

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.

People often say, 'I like your comics, even though I don't know enough math to get all of them,' as if it's some kind of club where they don't belong. But there's no club. There's just lots of people who are excited about thinking, learning, joking, and sometimes overanalyzing things.

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.

I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights. Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles - normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations.

I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals - or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it's not all that interesting.

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.'

When I was in college, I had a fear of cancer.

I think the weirdest question I've ever gotten was, 'If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes?'

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.'

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.

Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.

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.

You don't use science to show you're right, you use science to become right.

A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.

Space is about 100 kilometers away. That’s far away—I wouldn’t want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn’t that far away. If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.

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.

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.

Sometimes I mistake this for a universe that cares.

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'm not sure why we romanticize 'young love,' or love in general...It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you.

If 'other people have experiences incorrectly' is annoying to you, think how unbearable it must be to have a condescending stranger tell you they hate the way you're experiencing your life at just the moment you've found something you want to remember.

Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.

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.

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.

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.

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. You're curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. 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.

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.

Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.

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.

If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.