Back when I was a freelance magazine writer, I wrote a profile of a sculptor. … I was in his studio, and he had a sculpture of, I think, Robert Kennedy. …

And we were across the studio, and he said, “How does that look? Life-size?” And I said yes, it seemed life-size. And he brought me closer, and I saw that it was actually one-and-a-half times life-size. And he said, “If you make it life-size, it looks too small. You have to make it one-and-a-half times life-size.” But he was a sculptor and had spent his working life around various chemical toxins. He was clearly deranged.

As I mentioned in the introduction to the second book, you need to exaggerate life’s strangeness only a small amount to remember how strange it actually is.

Lovely little interview with John Hodgman: famous writer and minor television personality