Passive Engagement Quotes

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.

I'm a bit of a lurker on Reddit.

I read Twitter all the time, even though I rarely tweet.

Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives.... [It's] perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primordial ooze.

As you get going in the game you just kind of go along and you play the game.

If I disagree with someone, I let them have their say and move on. I don't want to be the one to lecture.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, 'Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not?' But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

I'm on Twitter. I love Twitter because I'm kind of voyeuristic. I don't tweet, but I look at other people's.

I went as an observer, not a participant, for I do not think that I ever spoke. I wanted to understand the issues under discussion, evaluate the arguments, see the calibre of the men involved.

I didn't really buy LPs or go to concerts.

When faced with people who have very limited conversational skills and no apparent desire to cultivate any it's always easier to simply go along.

And don’t worry about the bits you can’t understand. Sit back and allow the words to wash around you, like music.

Though not a participant in the Business of life; I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men.

Movies usually find me, but I'm open to anything.

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.

Seeing someone else perform and letting me be the critic for once... that's not a bad thing.

Television can stir emotions, but it doesn't invite reflection as much as the printed page.

I am a Facebook voyeur. I feel bad about it because I never put anything on there, but I find it fun to sit there and watch peoples' lives go by. Or whatever lives they're presenting.

When I go to a film, you're taking it easy and you let things wash over you. That's what cinema's all about. You get involved in a world that's being created in front of you.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

There's something about the silence of people listening to someone or watching someone - I just... I love that.

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way (there is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.

I don't mind either one [crowd that is more willing to interact or crowd that's more ready to just watch]. Both of them are forms of listening to what I'm saying so I can't ask for any more than that.

Nobody has Francis Bacon on their walls in their house - or very few people - but sometimes people listen to Beethoven as though it was background and a comfort, and I think that is very dangerous.

Very rarely will you listen to the radio in a judgmental way, the way you'll watch telly.