Don DeLillo Quotes

Social media puts us inside our phones and our computers and our headphones, and we're not connecting so much with our outside environment. Even when people go to the Grand Canyon they're more concerned about the selfies than actually looking at the canyon. I see it with my own kids - the addiction to needing things fast, never pausing to just see what's around us and connect with our fellow human beings in real time.

I'm certainly not opposed to digital technology, whose graces I daily enjoy and rely on in so many ways. But I worry about our virtual blinders.

We can be incredibly disconnected in this day and age with computers and cell phones.

When I tell children that they are far too dependent on their gizmos, they do not deny it. But they really don't care. This is their real life - texting about trivial things; listening to numbing music on their private headphones. The machines block everything out - you create your own little trivial world.

Since I've got on the Internet, it's opened a whole world of wasted time for me. My wife says she's an Internet widow.

We have to wonder whether digital technology, rather than making it easier to communicate, is actually doing the opposite. We now sit alone at a keyboard, firing off zeros and ones into the ether. Offices are silent.

Technology teaches passivity. Absorbed in our devices - at any age - we are absorbed in someone else's perspective.

I also wanted Parker to operate in the Internet age without losing being Parker. He's always operated in the world without really being with the world, and cyberspace means that the rest of us are more and more living the same way.

A troll's life is a no-physical-contact existence. You will die alone, as you die daily, online.

You look out on the street, and everyone has their heads in their phones. Nobody's really looking up at the sky or the buildings and taking the day in. I try to be conscious of it, but everybody falls prey to it.

In this day and age, technology has overtaken our lives and we are disconnected from reality.

In every public space, everyone has their head down on their phone. Including me.

I think it's a deeper issue on the lack of communication in our culture in general. It's not abnormal to see a family out to dinner and every person is on their phone instead of communicating with each other and that's pretty sad.

Groupings of people that get together, think things through, come out to plan and so on, like unions or true political organizations, they've disintegrated. And people tend to be atomized - you get down to a society based on social units based on an atom - an atomic element - which is a person and their computer. Not a society that is going to be able to function freely and democratically. The tendency is there; it doesn't have to be, but its something to worry about.

It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.

I think the Internet has definitely made it easier for people to have stuff seen, but it's also encouraged a level of ADD, where you see so much that if it doesn't make an impact on you immediately, you don't look at it.

I don't get up and look at e-mail. I don't even know my e-mail address. I needed one just to have a computer put on. But I never, ever even thought of going to it. It's just not what I'm about. I just don't want to waste my life with it. It's just too much; I think people are just a little too absorbed in all of that.

Technology is fine. . ., but that popular vision of the future, where you plug somebody in and leave them there and they don't get out and interact with actual flesh-and-blood humans - you know the answer before I say it - that's not good.

Success definitely brings on loneliness. People think you're lucky, that you have everything. They think you can go anywhere and do anything, but that's not the point. One hungers for the basic stuff.

All these things, social media or [smart] phones or the things that distract us from each other, are fairly new. They're all fairly new inventions, and I think we're in a stage where we sort of as a whole have gotten these new toys and we're just obsessed with playing with them. I feel like after a period of adjustment it will inevitably be a regression from where we are now.

Some people fear that technology will become more engaging than live human interactions. That's silly; technology is already way more interesting than other people.

Everyone is so addicted to their damn phone. It's sad to see the filmmaker's work diminished down to a computer screen.

In the future, I think you are going to want to capture a whole scene, a room, to be able to transport to that. To be able to stream what you are doing live and have people be able to interact in that space.

The only people who think the Internet is a calamity are people whose lives have been hurt by it; the only people who insist the Internet is wonderful are those who need it to give their life meaning.