A Quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
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I belong to a bowling team with black and Latino coworkers. And when we get together and we talk about politics - I'm almost quoting him - he said, we don't talk about Black Lives Matters. We talk about what matters to our families. We talk about jobs, and we talk about the fate of the country. That is America, and you can reach those people.
I can't write about rich people having relationship problems and breaking up in New York. I don't know that world of Terrence McNally. I knew I had to write people who talk the way I talk. And they talked very different than Terrence McNally.
I never talk about my money! It is interesting how awkward it is to talk about it, even though I talk about it in the abstract every day.
The way in which people talk about climate is just so wonky and so abstract and such a boys' club that it makes a lot of women just roll their eyes or feel that they are somehow not qualified. I certainly had to fight that feeling in myself in order to write about it.
When you talk about Social Security, it's not just enough to say, we're looking at you, this really matters. It's the fact that a million Americans think it matters. Oh, wait, it's 2 million Americans think it matters. No, it's 4 million Americans. It's 6 million, wait, it's 10 million, it's 50 million Americans who care about this. That's how we're going to make change.
Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.
It used to be, people were afraid to talk about Social Security. Now, I think people should be afraid not to talk about Social Security and start coming up with some solutions.
On the contrary, it's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics . It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!
If there is anything more annoying in the world than having people talk about you, it is certainly having no one talk about you.
It's different when you talk about immigration in the abstract... It's very different when you sit in front of a family, and [undocumented] children who grew up in this country, and who go to the same school you once went to... They thought if we only enforce the law, people will self-deport... It's not going to happen. The solution is not the status quo, or deportation when you're talking about breaking up families.
When we talk about the word 'socialism,' I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day.
People write about getting sick, they write about tummy trouble, they write about having to wait for a bus. They write about waiting. They write three pages about how long it took them to get a visa. I'm not interested in the boring parts. Everyone has tummy trouble. Everyone waits in line. I don't want to hear about it.
People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.
I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all — what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page — do they want someone to write on it?
I've come across a lot of people in my life who talk about poverty and talk about the poor, but you rarely have a sense that it matters to them to the point at which they will be willing to sacrifice something.
People like to talk a lot about me, about how I have anxiety or social disorders. I'll admit to anxiety, but it has nothing to do with media or being in front of a camera or being around people. It has to do with dealing with the sparring that I'm going to have or the workouts that I'm going to have from day to day.
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