Susan Orlean Quotes

I grew up in the '70s, when people talked on the phone - and just talked more. I remember the phone was the epicenter of our house. I spent hours every evening as a teenager waiting for the phone to ring and talking to my friends.

The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It's time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.

You used to be able to just call people. You didn't have to be on someone's calendar to have a phone conversation. The telephone was an important and valuable domain of communication, both for casual, friendly chats and for professional exchanges of ideas and information. But no more.

When she was in United States, we maintained contact, we talked to each other on the phone, almost every night. And there was one occasion I tried to fix this video conferencing but somehow it did not come out very well enough so better to talk on the phone.

You have to take into account it was the cell phone that became what the modern-day concept of a phone call is, and this is a device that's attached to your hip 24/7. Before that there was 'leave a message' and before that there was 'hopefully you're home.'

For a while, even in the house of good friends for dinner or for cocktails, they would really be upset. They thought I had single-handedly destroyed the best phone service in the world.

America—not Britain—has a use for the telephone. Here we have a superabundance of messengers, errand boys, and things of that kind.

This is an age of scientific wonders. You miss somebody so you pick up the phone to say hello. Three minutes for sixty-five cents. Nobody goes broke.

Before mobile phones, I used to call my parents from a phone box and reverse the charges.

Because of technology, we don't develop telepathy. We don't use telepathy, but use, you know, the mobile phones. Why?

Thinking of that movie 'The Artist'; if anyone ever needed to reach anyone, I'm just thinking they didn't have cell phones, they didn't have Internet, they didn't have email, so I always wonder how it was back then where you had to be home if you needed to get a phone call; otherwise, people couldn't get a hold of you.

I used to dream of some kind of way that you could carry a phone with you - but I never thought I would see it in my lifetime. It doesn't matter nowadays if you are caught in traffic or got lost on the way somewhere. You can just send a text and the recipient will know that you haven't fallen under a bus.

Here's what a phone is: It's a computer that has a little app on it that allows me to dial numbers and then talk to someone.

In 1991, few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call.

Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.

When I was a kid, among the other embarrassing things I would do, and there's a list of stupid things, but I would make these dumb comedy tapes. I would often make prank phone calls, but I would also do it with friends.

Everyone talks about how we're on our phones all the time, but the fact remains that when I'm away on a film set for two months, I can Skype my family. I remember the phone calls my parents had to make when my dad was away for a while when I was younger - that once-a-week expensive phone call! The time pressure on talking to your father!

Skype is a wonderful thing. The irony is that you never Skype when you're in the same country as someone.

I think about the automobile, I think about like, when I was a kid, you know, the invention of the answering machine, which I was like, 'Wow.' Or call waiting, which was, like, very big. It was a very big thing. Call waiting was a very big thing. And these incremental innovations happen constantly.

We've come a long way from having one land line that was forbidden to be answered during dinner. We had no answering machine, just a dad who barked, 'Who calls during dinner? If it's important, they'll call back.' He was right.

I call my parents twice a day when I'm away.

Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors' phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.

My mother had lived in London since I was little, so she never got to see my school plays and stuff.

I also love to surf the Net and talk on the phone with friends.

We are gradually coming within thinkable distance of the realization of a prophecy I had ventured to make four years ago, of a time when, if a person wanted to call to a friend he knew not where, he would call in a very loud electromagnetic voice, heard by him who had the electromagnetic ear, silent to him who had it not. “Where are you? ” he would say. A small reply would come, “I am at the bottom of a coalmine, or crossing the Andes, or in the middle of the Atlantic.” Or, perhaps in spite of all the calling, no reply would come, and the person would then know that his friend was dead. Think of what this would mean ... a real communication from a distance based on true physical laws.