Joel Stein Quotes

I don't read the "letters" section of Time magazine. I think it's just my habit as a reader. I don't read comments on stories, in general.

In reality, if there are 200 people commenting on something online, it's less than a grain of salt in a huge beach of humanity - who cares?

I think social media is good for promotion, stuff like that, but people are so negative. People are too negative. If you read the comments, it's just too negative.

It's a social life, or time to read the comment section: I prefer social life.

I love reading comments online.

Comments are proof most people don't read the articles.

I watch people all day long on Instagram, I take part in it too. It's like if you get the piece first, you have to immediately be like "BAH!" stunting.

Sometimes someone will tell me about an author I've never heard of before and that will send me to that person. That's how I discovered Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian novelist whose novels tend to be one long rant.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

Forget them, Wendy. Forget them all. Come with me where you'll never, never have to worry about grown up things again.

This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print in the long term is in paperback. The hardback has a certain life, and then it stops having that. It stops selling, and if you want the book to just stay around there has to be a paperback edition. So if there were not a paperback edition the book would eventually disappear from the shelves, and we would have lost the battle.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

One of the things on a very practical level as an actor or actress is that when you do a play, you do the entire story every time you do it. You have eight shows a week. You have a rehearsal process of four to five to six weeks. And then once you're in performance, everybody else goes away and you're there with your fellow actors and the audience and the material and your life becomes about that. And you go through the story from the beginning to the end every time you do it and depending on how long you do it, that's where the craft comes in.

No matter what, I will always prefer a live performance. Whether it be a play or a musical, or playing music live. As long as it's live, it's the best because there's sort of an immediacy to connection between an audience and a performer, whereas where you do film or television, you're at the whim of so many different forces.

Most kids come home from school. They don't go to their TVs first. They go to the Internet. They check their emails, or some blogs, or some sites. Then they go watch TV. Other people are at work all day 9-5 in front of a computer. They see certain clips. We're not going to hide the fact that people use the Internet. We're going to try to be as interactive as possible with our fans. I'm currently on Twitter and Facebook and Flicker and Dig. I'm on all that stuff.

They can boo me, yell at me, and throw peanuts at me, as long as they pay to get in.

I realized the other day that about the only author I genuinely read for pure pleasure is one of the worst authors in the world, a guy called Harry Stephen Keeler, a long dead American mystery writer. He was probably the greatest bad writer America ever produced.

I hear [my Twitter followers] say, you know, 'Bob Rae, you're an asshole'. [...] I'm working my way and trying to represent the people and speaking in Question Period and here we have vox populi, the thoughtful man on the street, 'you are an asshole!'. Thank you very much. I read it on my Twitter and I get up and ask a question.

Bush told me, he doesn't watch TV ... though it's untrue that he doesn't read the newspapers.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.'

You know, I did start a Twitter account, but that's the only thing I do. I feel torn because I don't want to promo myself and force that down people's throats, but on the other hand, that's a component. There's some real interest in, "Hey, what are you doing next?"

I've always taken any sort of audible response as a compliment, and I always understand it is our consumers' right and privilege to say whatever people want at our events. So as long as there's no silence, I'll keep being excited. But that stuff in the arenas is one thing. The comments on the internet - the obnoxious, visceral comments - are baffling to me. I just don't know why that's the way it is.

I'm on it pretty much all the time. I edit Wikipedia every day, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Twitter, I'm reading the news. During one of the US elections, I actually went through my computer and I blocked myself from looking at the major newspaper sites and Google News because I wasn't getting any work done.

I don't have a Twitter account. I don't go to fan club gatherings. I'm not one of those actors who spends a lot of time engaging with the audience.