Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex

Not Stephen Hawking — actually Nathan Myhrvold Nathan Myhrvold Born 1959 · Microsoft’s first chief technology officer; a former postdoctoral researcher under Hawking
Disputed In copyright

Hawking put this sentence in print, but not as his own: in the Foreword to The Illustrated A Brief History of Time he attributes it to Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft, a former post-doc of his. The version that circulates — a first-person boast opening “All of my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions…” — is recorded by Wikiquote ↗ as an unsourced variant that welds that Foreword remark onto an unrelated sentence from a 1997 television programme.

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex” Nathan Myhrvold, quoted by Stephen Hawking in his Foreword to The Illustrated A Brief History of Time — not Hawking himself. Via quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Stephen Hawking. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Stephen Hawking and his publishers). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Nathan Myhrvold — American technologist, inventor and author. Theme: "I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Quoted in
The Illustrated A Brief History of Time
Remarked by
Nathan Myhrvold, then of Microsoft — “a former post-doc of mine”, in Hawking’s words
Quoted by
Stephen Hawking, in his Foreword
The popular version
An unsourced splice of two separate statements

As Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft (a former post-doc of mine) remarked: I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex.

The Foreword sentence as Wikiquote ↗ transcribes it. Note the frame: Hawking is reporting a remark, and names the person who made it.

Wikiquote’s sourced entry for Stephen Hawking

How we verified this

  • Wikiquote’s Stephen Hawking page ↗ carries the real sentence — “All my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them” — sourced to the 1997 television programme Stephen Hawking’s Universe.
  • Directly beneath it, the same entry flags the familiar longer quip as an unsourced variant, and explains that it “seems to combine” that television sentence with a separate statement from the Foreword to The Illustrated A Brief History of Time.
  • That Foreword statement is the one carrying the Madonna line, and it is framed as a quotation: Hawking credits it to Nathan Myhrvold ↗, Microsoft’s first chief technology officer, who had been a postdoctoral researcher under him at Cambridge.
  • We were not able to open the Foreword itself: the 1996 edition is on the Internet Archive ↗ but access-restricted, and its search-inside service was unreachable from here. This page therefore rests on Wikiquote’s transcription, and asserts no page number or edition detail beyond what that entry states.
In copyright

The remark reaches us inside a book first published in the 1990s, far later than the 1931 cutoff for the United States public domain. Nothing here is public domain, and the underlying quip is Myhrvold’s.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

This is an unusual case. Hawking really did publish the sentence, so a reader who finds it in his book is not imagining things — but he published it as someone else’s line, and the version that spread quietly removed the credit.

Stephen Hawking Credit removed

Quote sites print the line in Hawking’s voice with no mention of Myhrvold. Wikiquote ↗ records the popular wording as an unsourced variant rather than a quotation of Hawking.

Two statements, spliced Paraphrase

The circulating text opens with a genuine Hawking sentence from the 1997 programme Stephen Hawking’s Universe, then bolts on the Foreword’s Madonna remark with a “Perhaps that is why…” bridge that appears in neither source, per Wikiquote ↗.

Nathan Myhrvold The real wit

Myhrvold ↗ is an inventor and businessman, Microsoft’s former chief technology officer and principal author of Modernist Cuisine — and, earlier, a postdoc of Hawking’s. Hawking names him in the Foreword.

Hawking wrote it down; Myhrvold said it. The line is a real remark by a real person — just not the person whose name it travels under, as Wikiquote ↗ documents.

Context

Why it mattered

A Brief History of Time did something science books are not supposed to do: it became a genuine mass-market bestseller, and stayed one for years. The joke lands because it measures physics against the most reliable seller in publishing, and physics wins.

It is also a neat illustration of how attribution decays. Nothing was fabricated here — the sentence is real, the book is real, the credit was printed. All that happened is that a quotation frame got dropped somewhere in the retelling, and a joke changed owners.

Nothing was invented. A quotation frame was simply dropped — and the joke changed owners.

Read the full story

The mechanism is worth naming, because it is common. When an author quotes someone in their own book, the quotation lives inside that author’s pages. Excerpt it without the frame and the surrounding voice becomes the speaker by default — no bad faith required.

The tell here is the “Perhaps that is why…” bridge in the popular version. It reads smoothly, which is exactly the problem: it is the seam where two separate statements were joined, and it appears in neither of the sources being joined.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Success Knowledge

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Stephen HawkingWikiquote

The sourced entry that records the popular wording as an unsourced variant and names Myhrvold as the source of the remark.
Nathan MyhrvoldWikipedia

Biography of the technologist who made the remark: Microsoft CTO, Intellectual Ventures co-founder, and a former Hawking postdoc.
The Illustrated A Brief History of TimeInternet Archive

The 1996 illustrated edition whose Foreword carries the remark. Access-restricted, so we could not read the Foreword directly.
A Brief History of TimeWikipedia

Background on the book whose extraordinary sales the joke is about.
Daniel J. BoorstinWikiquote

A second, unrelated saying widely misattributed to Hawking — useful context on how his name attracts quotations.

The author

About Nathan Myhrvold

Nathan Myhrvold

Born 1959 · American technologist, inventor and author

Nathan Myhrvold is an American inventor, scientist and businessman who served as the first chief technology officer of Microsoft, and later co-founded Intellectual Ventures and TerraPower. Before that he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge under Stephen Hawking. He is also the principal author of Modernist Cuisine, a work about food that is, characteristically, mostly about physics.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Hawking, Stephen. Foreword to The Illustrated A Brief History of Time, quoting a remark by Nathan Myhrvold. As transcribed in “Stephen Hawking,” Wikiquote.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-have-sold-more-books-on-physics-than-madonna-has-on-sex/

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