American Quotes

You know, when I was younger I was into all kinds of art - drawing, painting, all that stuff. But I played drums, played piano forever.

L.A.'s cool; I had a run with it to where it just pretty much wore me out. I love the weather and I have great friends there, great family, but I really cannot take a lot of the culture. Like Nashville, where everybody's a songwriter, everybody out there is an actor.

If you are close to your parents or a grandparent, you watch as they get old and you learn so much from that, and it makes you want to learn more while you have time.

I was able to be more reckless and now I still make mistakes, but having kids, you have a responsibility and these little people who are looking up to you for everything.

I don't think I thought I was going to go into music, and I don't think it hit me until I was 13 or 14, and then I was gone. Just like that. At that point, there was nothing else that could keep my attention.

Being with my kids is really important to me, being a good dad and being around a lot.

All of my records have been very personal, just writing more and more songs, you get better at being able to say what you feel.

There's just something hypnotic about maps.

The future is here.

The Final Jeopardy! questions seem to be, by design, things you can't know. And so it's not about who knows them, but who can figure them out in thirty seconds.

Sure I have a cell-phone, so I don't have to remember everyone's number anymore, but that really wasn't a core part of my brain.

People are using GPS systems to find millions of little hidden objects throughout the world - often as simple as a piece of Tupperware hidden in the woods. You go to a website, you get the latitude and longitude to get the specific location of a certain specific hiding space, and then you go there a

Knowing lots of answers but being a millisecond slow on the buzzer is indeed very frustrating.

It's so much fun that the money is just icing on the cake. There seems to be a lot of icing.

It's really changed me. For the first time I'm in favor of the Bush tax cuts.

It's boring to have the same guy win. I'm actively rooting against myself.

If it's on the Internet, then it's gotta be true.

If I start outsourcing all my navigation to a little talking box in my car, I'm sort of screwed. I'm going to lose my car in the parking lot every single time.

I would stare at maps of Delaware for hours.

I would read the atlas for pleasure. I knew it was weird. It was weird.

I remember one of my last shows, the Final Jeopardy! clue was something like 'These two boys' names are top 10 boys' names in the U.S., they both end with the same letter, and they're both names of Jesus' apostles.' Now, obviously that's not a knowable fact.

I have condemned my kids to a lifetime of geographic illiteracy.

I have always loved maps.

I can't relax and sink back in the couch and watch 'Jeopardy!' the way I used to.

For some reason the most devoted mapheads seem to be kids.

For me, it started as a child with one of those little wooden jigsaw maps of the U.S., where's there's crocodiles on Florida and apples on Washington state. That was my very first map.

Even before you understand them, your brain is drawn to maps.

During the whole 'Jeopardy' experience, I felt like I was living a bit of a double life, I would be secretly flying out to L.A. to tape new shows, hoping that none of my coworkers would notice the absence and figure out what was going on. 'Jeopardy' tries very hard to keep their secrets.

As Jeopardy devotees know, if you're trying to win on the show, the buzzer is all. On any given night, nearly all the contestants know nearly all the answers, so it's just a matter of who masters buzzer rhythm the best.

You live overseas, you see these exotic places and you want to know about them. But, weirdly, it also made me homesick for all these very prosaic places in America.