James Frey Quotes

When we look back on this time and we are going to see what the Internet brought us, and social media brought us, I think people are going to say 'how did people know anything in those years, during that particular time in history?' Because there is so much disorganization in the information.

A lot of the people in history who I really admire lived before the hyperinformation age we're living in. Even if they were governing or solving problems in consequential periods, like the Civil War or the world wars or the Great Depression or the Cold War, they had a period of time and space to actually think, to be private and you read their biographies, and they had time to think about what was happening and how to respond. I don't think human nature has changed in the last 50-150 years, but the stresses, the demands on those of us in public life have just exploded.

The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form.

We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.

It's just different today. Nobody seems to last too long these days. I wouldn't know how to get started today.

I hear the same anxieties over and over again. Everything is too fast; everything is too precarious. We have more access than ever to the people we are trying to reach, thanks to social media and mobile technology, and more information than we know what to do with.

We're living in this world where we have so much media all the time. We have access to imagery all the time.

One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.

Why do I feel so exercised about what we think of the people of the Middle Ages? ... I guess it's because so many of their voices are ringing vibrantly in my ears - Chaucer's, Boccaccio's, Henry Knighton's, Thomas Walsingham's. Froissart's, Jean Creton's... writers and contemporary historians of the period who seem to me just as individual, just as alive as we are today. We need to get to know these folk better in order to know who we are ourselves.

I want to tell everybody that you won't hear me trying to pop bottles in the club and all that kind of stuff. It's just not me and I think as long as you stay within your element and your age bracket, sure you're going a couple of young folks and teens, but that's not who I'm focused on. I'm really not. I love whoever supports, but I'm just not going to try and go back there because times have changed. If you don't move with the times, you'll get left off. I'm trying to change with the times.

Now, we live in an age where we have so much information that we do tend to overload. The Greeks did too, though.

I calculated the total time that humans have waited for web pages to load. It cancels out all the productivity gains of the information age. Sometimes I think the web is a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society.

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream.

Information is the religion of the modern world.

I don't think that you can rehash music that was born in the Fillmore East and came from a whole different set of social and emotional circumstances. The situation has changed. Let's get real about this.

With the only certainty in our daily existence being change, and a rate of change growing always faster in a kind of technological leapfrog game, speed helps people think they are catching up.

By the end of the 20th Century there will be a generation to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen quire of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone... and to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine.

We're living in a world where everything moves very quickly. We've become a very visual society, so I think it's a very natural thing that people are captivated with the illustrations in a story.

I am not offering this is a critique of the internet, its just that there are a lot of factors involved. It does offer plenty of possibilities. It also has, it can have, a cheapening effect and I think both exist and I think its true of everything. You could say that about the printing press.

We just may be the most well-informed, yet least self-aware, people in history.

I think the world is really small today, and fashion, from that end of it, it's instantaneous everywhere.

Keep skid chains on your tongue. Say less than you think. Cultivate a pleasant voice. How you say it is often more important than what you say.

What is absolutely true is that any good [Television] series has a specific voice. And I think that voice is almost exclusively the domain of the executive producer. . . . As a staff writer you're not being called upon to be the great creative person. You're sort of called upon to understand the characters and their voices and put them through certain paces.

A phenomenon occurs but because you're in the middle of it, you just think it's your life-until it's over. And then you look back and say, What an unusual thing happened to me in the '60s.