A Quote by Paulo Coelho
Never talking to strangers. Saying nasty things about the neighbors.
Related Quotes
It's good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for awhile their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.
You can be tweeting strangers and saying, 'Don't say that,' but are you saying that to your friends? How about your mom? Your boyfriend at the dinner table who says something homophobic? If you're not saying the same things in person that you're saying online, then what are your tweets doing?
My first album was mainly dealing with street issues, and it was 'coded': it was called 'Reasonable Doubt.' So the things I was talking about... I was talking about in slang, and it was something that people in the music business was not really privy to. They didn't understand totally what I was saying or what I was talking about.
As a child, I heard many warnings from teachers about the perils of talking with strangers. Yet now, fairly late in my life, I can think of not many things better than to talk with strangers. The idea of being a stranger is also very appealing.
So the HP guy comes up to me (at the Melbourne conference) and he says, 'If you say nasty things like that to vendors you're not going to get anything'. I said, 'No, in eight years of saying nothing, we've got nothing, and I'm going to start saying nasty things, in the hope that some of these vendors will start giving me money so I'll shut up'.
Anger is one of the most intimate of emotions and to expose it to strangers is one of the most stupid and sickening things to do. Never get angry with strangers because they are strangers.
I don't mind if people are saying nasty things about me behind my back - I just don't want to know about them.
I'm very, very private; I don't enjoy talking about myself to strangers. Particularly strangers with tapes going.
MTV and the culture industry never are talking about community relevance, hood organization, they aren't talking about ethical codes, they aren't talking about forms of political organization, they don't speak about codes inside the jails. What they talk about are superficial things.
I often don't endorse what I tweet, rather I want to throw things about to spark conversation or controversy. What I think about something is not particularly important when talking to thousands of unknown strangers.
One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.
We'd never be talking about Senator McGrath saying anything about state and local governments should be going bankrupt. I'd never even think about it.
If I'm chatting to someone who's an anxious wreck and I don't understand it, because I've never been anxious, then it's strange. There's no real way of talking to them about it without saying, 'I've no idea what you're talking about. I'm better than you.'
People feel they can say nasty things and have anonymity behind the net - as they did with all the nasty comments about me - without fear of recrimination.
Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time.
Well, I would never admit to copying Karl Rove's play book, but there's no doubt that what the Bush people did in 2004 was impressive. They had neighbors talking to neighbors. They did a remarkable job increasing Republican turnout in states like Ohio and Florida.
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