Quotes from Tom Bodett

I'm not an impersonator. I've only got one voice and only do one guy and his first-person essays.

People feel vulnerable when they travel. Nobody wants to be taken advantage of or talked into something they don't want. Staying at Motel 6 makes you feel smarter. In fact, I think it actually means you are smarter, but I have no hard data to support that.

The difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist laughs to forget, but a pessimist forgets to laugh.

Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.

I know how to make adults laugh pretty well. I don't know if kids think I'm that funny.

Did you ever notice that nobody you see on television looks like anyone you know?

Professor Al Drake encouraged me to just write the way I talk. I decided if that's what I needed to do, I didn't need to be in school to do it.

I originated my own cliches, but I'm finding that's not working for me anymore.

It's not like Alaska isn't wilderness - it mostly is. But most Alaskans don't live in the wild. They live on the edge of the wild in towns with schools and cable TV and stores and dentists and roller rinks sometimes. It's just like anyplace else, only with mountains and moose.

Like most Alaska immigrants, my roots continue to petition for equal time.

Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.

Kids in Alaska don't know they're growing up on the Last Frontier. It's just what they see on the license plates, and it's something tourists like to say a lot because they've never been around so many mountains and moose before.

There's a lot of people around Alaska now who are actually running the place who claim to just have gone there for the summer once 30 years ago. And that seems to be what happens.

John Muir, the famous naturalist, wrote in his journal that you should never go to Alaska as a young man because you'll never be satisfied with any other place as long as you live. And there's a lot of truth to that.

I went to Alaska as a young man just looking for adventure. And like so many of us in the '70s, we found it.

Could the garment and appliance industries be in cahoots together, creating an artificial sock demand to keep us buying?

Thirty-two is the age we turn into actual adults.

Somebody says, 'Do a Tom Bodett, a folksy kind of thing,' and it sounds like something out of 'Hee Haw,' very insulting. They turn wry humor into disparaging sarcasm, and you get what amounts to insulting advertising.

The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.

The difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist laughs to forget but a pessimist forgets to laugh.

They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world; someone to love, something to do and something to hope for.

Fanny had little or no self-esteem on her best days, and courage was another commodity she had precious little experience with. She dropped to her knees and prayed with all her heart for both. It was clear to her that divine intervention was the only way she would be able to rejoin that insufferable Argus Winslow and the dreadful waitress.

I'm real. I believe what I'm saying. If Motel 6 wasn't the type of operation they say it is - and I stay at them when I travel - I wouldn't do their commercials. That comes through on the radio, and that's what it's all about.

What you hear is southern Michigan, not a drawl, but a halting kind of speech where you leave spaces when there shouldn't be any. We take a breath anywhere.