Tao Lin Quotes

'You've got mail!' exclaims the cheery automaton at America Online. The flag on the mailbox icon waves invitingly on my computer screen. For a second, I'm 10 years old again, waiting for the postman's whistle to slice the stillness of an Australian afternoon.

Anyone wishing to communicate with Americans should do so by e-mail, which has been specially invented for the purpose, involving neither physical proximity nor speech.

Email cannot die in the near future because of its universal acceptance.

Clearly texting, SMS and chat are very different than writing a letter or email.

I actually get very little phone calls. I get way more tweets and texts. My phone rarely rings.

I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.

Don't think of the Internet as a broadcast medium...think of it as a conversational space. Conversation is the opposite of marketing. It's talking in our own voices about things we want to hear about.

I don't think of Twitter as a social network. I think of it as a messaging system that has a lot of social components to it.

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it.

People no longer write letters. Lacking the leisure, and, for the most part, the ability, they dictate dispatches, and scribble messages. When you are in the humor, you should take a peep at some of the letters written by people who lived long ago.

The post office is raising the price of stamps again. I heard that and said to myself, 'If only there was an inexpensive electronic way of communicating.'

My younger son told me nobody uses email anymore. I'm this old fogie with my email. I don't know what I'm supposed to communicate with now - SnapChat?

The Bible talks about your spirit being immortal, that you were created for existence beyond your physical body. Well, that's no different from Scientology! I don't think that because the word someone uses for spirit is thetan that the definition becomes any different.

I have come to think we have to treat Donald Trump's tweets like Snapchat. It's just something that is going to go away. And it flies out of some region of his brain and it goes out into the ether. And usually it's on the realm of media.

I think such an inquiry will reveal a rather different picture: namely, it will reveal a very strong tendency for the intellectuals who are respected and privileged to be those who subordinate themselves to power.

No one wants their personal emails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy.

I think the term "intellectual property" should be avoided, not because it's a bad term, but because it mixes things up that shouldn't be mixed up. There are different forms, and they hardly have anything to do with each other.

What I think of blogs is just this: Some are beautifully written and many are not. But even blogs that aren't necessarily "well" written are great for the person writing them.

It only seems jarring when you look back on the work I've done. I think if you had to map that out at the beginning and you said, "Right, sit down, this is what you're going to be doing," you'd probably freak out. But I'm someone who really enjoys not being himself. So if you consider that, then it all sort of makes sense. And I just think that's the job of an actor. I guess that's the variation that you're talking about. It's probably a byproduct of just constantly looking for something different, because that's what I feel like I'm supposed to do.

The history and our experience shows that Democrats and Republicans think the same way in some cases, and their ideas aren't very different when it comes to international relations.

Everybody has their own problems. No matter how big you think yours are, there is someone else that has bigger problems or different problems.

Donald Trump really is who he is, and I think, for example, he'll probably tweet his entire life - and that's a fact. I just hope people get over it.

I think there are different kinds of elites. I think there are venal elites, and self-interested elites, and selfish elites, and I think there are visionary elites.

Secretary Hillary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department. She also used numerous mobile devices to send and to read email on that personal domain.

The weird part is actually, there were so many exceptionally talented people there [ on "MADtv"]. But it was a disaster. I don't think I enjoyed any of it, really. I had a different sensibility.