Adam Savage

Remember kids, I have life insurance.

My dignity and good television - they'll never meet.

Growing up in New York, I was sort of shocked when I realized that my children ...
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Whether it's the experiments on 'MythBusters' or my earlier work in special effects for movies, I've ...
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Of course, I love tools. I also love arranging them, to the point where I came ...
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Am I about to feel really, really stupid?

Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them.

Audiences of critical thinkers are my favorite kinds of audiences. There are jokes I tell in the show that don't get laughs unless I am in front of an audience of critical thinkers. Put me in front of a crowd of science teachers or astronauts! The guileless aren't our audience - it's the critical thinkers we love.

Being a geek is all about learning the inventories of things.

Bigger is always better.

Failure is always an option.

Deadlines refine the mind. They remove variables like exotic materials and processes that take too long. The closer the deadline, the more likely you'll start thinking waaay outside the box.

Growing up in New York, I was sort of shocked when I realized that my children are Californians. They are 14 years old, and I explain to them frequently that they will never realize the glory of a snow day. You wake up and the world says, 'Oops, it's too much fun to go to school, you've got to stay home and deal with the snow!'

Firemen have the coolest toys ever!

I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my 'Creative Projects' folder - it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an Internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos.

I go home at the end of the day and I rarely talk about what I did that day. So my wife's experience is just like that of anybody else whose husband goes away to a blue collar job and comes home bruised and dirty and often proud of the work that they're doing.

I am now standing in a mixture of cooling fluid, gasoline, and cola.

I have some ideas on how to fix that. They're not very good ideas, but at least they're ideas!

I just had one of those 'what the hell are we doing' moments.

I reject your reality and substitute my own.

I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody's going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you're here. And when you don't, well, you suffer the consequences.

I learned at an early age that I could make the things that I wanted. That's a very powerful thing to realize as a kid. LEGOs were a key part of that.

I would have to say that looked like it hurt.

I wouldn't say jamie is an evil genius. I'm not sure he's evil and I'm not sure he's a genius.

I'm actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion. My children continue this trend.

I'm not a sculptor, I'm a hard-edged model maker. You give me a drawing, you give me a prop to replicate, you give me a crane, scaffolding, parts from 'Star Wars' - especially parts from 'Star Wars' - I can do this stuff all day long. It's exactly how I made my living for 15 years.

I'm not gonna shoot anyone with the pellet gun... Not unless I have to!

Isn't television glamourous?

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a 'failed experiment.' Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.

I've always thought something that makes you laugh, it makes you laugh because there's a little bit of truth to it.

It's sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity. It's about mindset of looking at the world in a playful and curious and creative way.

I've learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving.

Jamie doesn't like to do anything hastily, and I like to do everything incredibly hastily. So therein you have the dichotomy of our patterns.

Jamie's gonna go take a break now, and i am going to continue the on-going process of making a fool of myself and go ahead and try it myself.

Let's blow some stuff up.

Let's get on our knees and pray. I don't know to whom. Is there a patron saint of ballistics gel?

My advice is keep your lips away from the spinning things.

My dignity and good television - they'll never meet.

Of course, I love tools. I also love arranging them, to the point where I came up with a name for my organizing metric: first-order retrievability.

New York State is giant and has some of the most beautiful landscape on the Eastern seaboard. There is so much history in New York State, from the Erie Canal to the Catskills, the birth of American stand-up comedy.

Prayer doesn't work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I've paid attention. I've pictured what I want to happen in my life. I've meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn't work for me about them.

Remember kids, I have life insurance.

Stand back! I gotta get some rocket fuel out of the fridge!

That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show. It may not look pretty, but it gets the job done.

That's the show. it's like 5 minutes of science and then 10 minutes of me hurting myself.

The best-case scenario is that the glass shatters in my face! How do you think that makes me feel?

The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century - it was actually mummified, skin and all - but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire.

The 'Mythbusters' crew, we monitor the Discovery boards, we look for the new ideas that are being forwarded on those boards, and we keep track of what's going on, we keep updated.

The skeptical community is absolutely near and dear to the 'Mythbusters' heart and there's no small reason that they've embraced us. That's our people. That's the way we like to think.

The only thing that differentiates you and me from a couple of fourteen year old pyromaniacs is balistic glass!

There's this group online that I frequent. It's a group of prop crazies just like me called the Replica Props Forum, and it's people who trade, make and travel in information about movie props.

There is no dignity in television.

This is the point in the show where we say, 'Oh, what else do we have in the van that's flammable?'

We didn't set out to be educators or even scientists, and we don't purport that what we do is real science but we're demonstrating a methodology by which one can engage and satisfy your curiosity.

We're not leaving here without Buster, man. Leave no crash-test dummy behind!

Whether it's the experiments on 'MythBusters' or my earlier work in special effects for movies, I've regularly had to do things that were never done before, from designing complex motion-control rigs to figuring out how to animate chocolate.

When I finally got up to Industrial Light And Magic to work on the 'Star Wars' movies as a model-maker, it felt like dying and going to heaven.