John Zimmer Quotes

Theaters are always going to be around, and doing fine. With computers and technology, we're becoming more and more secluded from each other. And the movie theater is one of the last places where we can still gather and experience something together. I don't think the desire for that magic will ever go away.

I think that theater is a unique way to communicate with people as they gather together with other people they may not even know. It creates a sense of shared community for the time of the performance that hopefully carries over into other aspects of the audience's life because they have shared this experience together.

My flat in Ladbroke Grove, west London, is in the best building in the world. It's like a commune - everyone gets on - and on Friday evenings I often cook us all dinner.

Audiences want and need a shared viewing experience.

You have to think about why you're asking an audience to come to the theater. It's not that they should come because it's good for them, because it's the vegetables that they should eat and the culture shot that they should get... It's about experience and building community and catalyzing dialogue and bringing people together.

The desire to share is not a vague, windy sentiment, not when you see the massive rise in live concerts in response to the phenomenon of downloading music... People want to get rid of the headphones and be part of a shared experience.

Watching TV is companionable: you share an experience, you can comment on the action here and there for a bit of conversation... it's a way of showing someone that you want his or her company and engaging in a low-key, pleasant, undemanding way.

I think the key that makes Airbnb is the fact that we're a community, not just a series of commodities.

Be in community, go out to dinner together, do things together. We lose that, we lose a lot. It's important to come together.

When we first created the Lyft community, we wanted to make cities feel smaller and more connected by bringing people together through transportation. In 20 months since we launched, we've seen drivers and passengers redefine the true meaning of community through Lyft in countless ways.

The local community is very important in one's life; the feelings of identification with a place and people.

It used to be that we felt that when we went to a theater, a legitimate theater... that we were going to share an experience together. That when we walked away where there would be something to talk about in that movie that had some meaning and relevance in our lives. And I think that we have lost that.

If you are what you eat, then you are shaped by what you share as you eat.

It's good for art to make us think, to give us a shared experience that creates a dialogue, makes us talk to each other, including strangers.

What we've tried to do is have neighbors, colleagues, friends and family talking.

Complete strangers can stand silent next to each other in an elevator and not even look each other in the eye. But at a concert, those same strangers could find themselves dancing and singing together like best friends. That's the power of music.

Ultimately, jokes are this really special thing that we can all share. It's exciting to have basically a thousand people in a room together that can laugh at the same time, but I think of it almost as, like, a religious experience.

I think live music is really, really important. And I think it's very important to do together. It's much more fun to play to music together than the one person listening to their lone iPod Shuffle. I think it's an amazing way to build community and have children do things that are funded that's not a videogame.

I see dance as glue for a community.

The collective experience of watching a great film together in a room is a transcendent moment that will never die.

Video has become much more social, and as a result, there are many opportunities to use video as a way to connect people, to give them opportunities to play and participate, to make things together and have a shared social experience. I think we are just at the beginning of really exploring what social video is and what we can make of it.

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.

I connect with just plain old everyday people. Human behavior fascinates me, the people who are the nuts and bolts of this country who help hold up the world.

People don't do the Macarena together. Or if they do, they do it to get closer, to get together. It's the same thing with the Electric Slide.

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