Paul Theroux Quotes

With technology, there is so much isolation with people now, that there are very few places where you can connect.

I usually try to stay off my phone and enjoy the world, but when I am on my phone, it's always for social media - to talk to my bros and my fans and my friends.

On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. But the truth is life is being lived there. When they smile - right, you've seen people stop - all of a sudden, life is being lived there, somewhere up in that weird, dense network.

People live too much of their lives on email or the Internet or text messages these days. We're losing all of our communication skills.

The main Facebook usage is so big. About 20 percent of the time people spend on their phone is on Facebook.

I think there's a fear of disconnect sometimes; communication is a huge issue for all of us, from adults to kids, as far as our face-to-face time and our ability to interact with each other without isolating itself to a phone. I think that has to be something that's very challenging.

I am always texting!

We go into restaurants, and people aren't talking anymore. They're texting. While they are sitting at a restaurant with each other. So we're losing this intimacy that we need to have as human beings.

It's easy to look at kids sitting around a campfire looking at their phones and to think, 'What a shame.' But I think they're going to be more advanced in terms of communication than my generation.

My generation was secretive, brooding, ambitious, show-offy, and this generation is congenial. Totally. I imagine them walking around with GPS chips that notify them when a friend is in the vicinity, and their GPSes guide them to each other in clipped electronic lady voices and they sit down side by side in a coffee shop and text-message each other while checking their e-mail and hopping and skipping around Facebook to see who has posted pictures of their weekend.

People are always looking at their phones and computer. It's the first place people turn in the morning and where everyone's keeping in touch and getting their news.

It's hard to say conversation has become a minimal thing, because look at the rise of mobile communications in the last 10 years. It used to be only the president had a mobile phone. Now everyone on earth, even if they have nothing else, they have a cell phone.

Habitual texters may not only cheat their existing relationships, they can also limit their ability to form future ones since they don't get to practice the art of interpreting nonverbal visual cues.

People simply don't make eye contact anymore.

I find it personally distracting when kids are constantly texting, but they can be texting something that is just benign and just fine.

You're talking about a younger generation, Generation Y, whose interpersonal communication skills are different from Generation X. The younger generation is more comfortable saying something through a digital mechanism than even face to face.

I've never seen anything like the way some young people behave. They go out on a date, and they're sitting opposite each other at a table, and they're not looking at each other, and they text each other as though they're deaf-mutes. It's insane.

I do text a lot. Sometimes, at night, my thumbs hurt because I've texted so much, so I definitely text too much.

Texting is apocalyptic on some level. It's a reduction of things.

In this great age of communication, there a lot of people you can't actually understand. I know everyone tweets, and twits and texts and all that, but actually we've all got voices, and it is awfully nice to hear them and if you can understand what people are saying.

All coffee shops now have WiFi. Why bring a book when you could be wittily attacking some idiot columnist on Twitter, or responding to your date requests, or posting a picture of your foot? All of that is more gripping and immediate and social than books.

In America, everyone writes but no one reads. Everyone's writing all day long - sending emails, tweets, text messages; they all think they're James Cameron's Avatar, performing in some video game for which they make up the script.

We're so connected, kind of ever-presently, with technology now. People are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much.

It's impossible. You try to have any kind of relationship with your family, with a man, or with a friend, and you have to be on the phone and the Internet the entire time.

Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them.