Joseph Gordon-Levitt Quotes

I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

Social media gives one a family to share one's life with.

We've seen that there are a lot of people out there - teenagers in Topeka, housewives in Long Island, millionaire Internet start-up moguls - that all want to connect with each other about what it is to be human.

Indeed, the spread of 'virtual' communities on the Internet speaks to a deep hunger to reach out to others.

If it's just me on stage telling stories for, like, an hour, that's great. That's fine. But like a sandcastle on the beach, it gets washed away at night. It's so much more powerful if we can all share our narratives and doorstep moments and make us feel a little less alone. I'm just trying to use social media and new media as a way to capture that.

I share so much of my life on social media, and I love the honest connection with the people that follow me.

It turns out that the most powerful use of technology is to connect people together socially.

I wish we could all have a telling room, a place where we go to tell our stories and listen to the stories of others; in our culture, the telling room might be around the dinner table or in the car on a long trip.

I don't know exactly what it is, but it looks like interconnected websites where people show their photos and write about everything going on in their lives, like whether they found a parking spot or what they ate for breakfast." "But why?" Josh asks.

I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared.

Story, finally, is humanity's autobiography.

I think having not only personal connections with friends and family I'm able to pull from, but having a connection with so many people through social media, it also feels like I have a relationship with those people that follow me. And feel that what I'm going through, they've gone through something similar, and that's why we've connected. And they're the ones that make it into that body of work that represents them or that time in their life, because we've found each other.

No good thing is pleasant without friends to share it.

The inside jokes weren't jokes anymore. They had become stories. Nobody brought up the bad names or the bad times. And nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.

Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are. A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.

I do like Twitter. Writing is a solitary pursuit, and it can get lonely. I like to go into Twitter for a short period of time, communicate with clever friends, and then switch it off. That's perfect for me.

To connect to people at the deepest level, you need stories.

Stories are people. I'm a story, you're a story ... your father is a story. Our stories go in every direction, but sometimes, if we're lucky, our stories join into one, and for a while, we're less alone.

Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is, because you know people who have similar experiences.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

Nobody is happy alone. To share experiences is always a good thing.

To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.

The point of life for me is just to make connections with people and share experiences with people.

The virtual community? The word virtual does not mean "virtue." It means "not." When I go to the store and they say: The shirt that you brought in is virtually done. It means it is not done, in the same way that the virtual community is not a community. There is no commitment there. When you log off, you are not a member of it anymore. My flesh and blood community, the sense of knowing my neighbor, knowing the guy across the street, having dinner with the people down the block, getting along with each other and making compromises, that's a genuine community with a commitment.

The tools of social networking: These are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story.