Anonymous Interactions Quotes

In terms of the most unique thing we do socially, my vote goes to something we invented alongside cities - we have lots of anonymous interactions and interactions with strangers. That has shaped us enormously.

Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.

Virtual environments are anonymous, and I'm concerned that people - mainly younger folks who grow up this way - will see social relationships as part of a game.

Intimacy is important in my work because I don't understand existence without intimacy. All of us are dependent on other people - and in ways we don't know. You cross the street and assume that person isn't crazy, they don't want to mow me down with their car. I don't know that person but I am already in a relationship with them. I am asking them to abide by the traffic laws. If they decided not to, I'd be dead. Even in those anonymous ways, we're in relationships.

New York is like a big dinner party. You have to be very careful about what you say and do because you never know whose feet are touching under the table.

I never know why people come up to me. I think a lot of them just get super-excited because they recognize me from TV but they don't remember where.

It's no big deal if I disappoint strangers.

My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.

With social media now, everybody's faceless, but I assume these kids sending me pictures of myself of Instagram are twelve, thirteen years old.

About once every four days, someone comes up to me and is like, 'Hey, I know you from somewhere.'

I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seem before and would never see again, a wandered for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse left him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night than I could if I had known them for 10 years. If you are interested in human nature, it is one of the greatest pleasures of travel.

You've got the people you know, which are problematic. Always. They're rich but they're also real people living their lives alongside you. Then you've got the people that you make-up completely, who are often missing a dimension if they don't have some reference to real people. So strangers exist in this in-between space, where in not knowing them, you are creating a fiction for them, even in passing, but at the same time, there they are, with their actual bodies and their actual clothes. It's totally enticing.