The best fights don’t occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.
I’m an off-the-charts introvert. To me, being around groups of strangers is exhausting. I’ve had to sort of train myself to think about two tactics: finding common ground and invoking humor.
People are always asking me baking questions – from strangers DMing me on Instagram, to friends I don’t otherwise talk to anymore texting me, to my own mother and sister calling me on the phone demanding answers.
It’s good for art to make us think, to give us a shared experience that creates a dialogue, makes us talk to each other, including strangers.
I don’t really get off on the anonymous love of strangers, which I think a lot of actors do. They’re lacking something in their own personal lives, so they want the adoration of autographs and all that stuff.
Soon the child learns that there are strangers, and ceases to be a child.
No one’s arguing that the Internet is evil. But talking about strangers is another conversation you have to have with your kids.
Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you’re really strangers.
How do you live with one person for 13 years and another for eight and find both as alien as strangers?
But, sir, they have written me down upon the history of the country as worthy of expulsion, and in no unkindness I must tell them that for all future time my self-respect requires that I shall pass them as strangers.
As a Muslim, I like to watch Fox News for the same reason I like to play ‘Call of Duty.’ Sometimes, I like to turn my brain off and watch strangers insult my family and heritage.
You always hear that tragedies put sports in perspective, that they prove we shouldn’t care this much about the successes and failures of a bunch of wealthy strangers. I’m going the other way – sometimes, sports put everything else in perspective.
A couple of weeks ago, I did karaoke and got nervous in a way I hadn’t gotten nervous in 25 years. I’m so used to getting on stage in front of strangers to tell jokes, but singing is a whole different animal.
Shoes tell you a lot about someone. Think of ‘Strangers on a Train.’ The first thing we see are Bruno’s shoes. We know right away that something is up.
Dad’s funeral was standing room only; most in attendance were strangers to me. At the back, a lone Marine stood silently, then left. People told me he’d saved their life or helped them in their darkest hour.
Airbnb has proven that hospitality, generosity, and the simple act of trust between strangers can go a long way.
The Internet lets thousands of total strangers collaborate to produce a truly hivelike result.
People say New Yorkers can’t get along. Not true. I saw two New Yorkers, complete strangers, sharing a cab. One guy took the tires and the radio; the other guy took the engine.
The challenge for me as an actor is if you become a celebrity, you don’t meet strangers anymore. And strangers are where we have our anonymity. And I believe it’s essential for the soul to be anonymous, especially if you’re going to be an actor.
So I think rather than being attracted so much now to working with my heroes, I’m sort of more attracted to working with completely unlikely strangers because it’s more exciting really.
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?
Families have a sense of kinship that no four strangers would ever have as a team.
I have always done films with friends rather than strangers.
If you go away on location for three months and your wife stays at home, you’ve made a whole new load of friends and she’s made a whole new load of friends and you get home and you’re kind of strangers.
I like test screenings. I like to see a movie with an audience of strangers. I think it tells you a lot.
I loved ‘SNL’ growing up, and I would trick my babysitter into letting me stay up to watch it. My family would rent Marx brothers’ movies and Monty Python episodes, and we watched ‘In Living Color’, ‘The State’, and ‘Strangers with Candy’.
So much of a stand-up’s life is doing live radio and having to be funny and quick on the spot with these strangers, and sort of surgical in terms of how funny I can be in three minutes.
I got my first whiff of what big-time adult literature was all about when I was in 8th grade. I got it from Mark Linn-Baker. You know – the guy from ‘Perfect Strangers.’
I am a really passive person to begin with so I have written a lot of pretty crappy songs with strangers because I let it go in a direction that I didn’t feel it should have and I didn’t know them well enough to speak up.
When we cut ‘Strangers In The Night,’ we did the whole song in two takes.
When people ask me what I do, strangers on a plane, perhaps, I tell them that I think. Thinking is excellent exercise, as much as swimming or jogging.
It’s different when you’re an actor and playing a part, but when it’s just you, you feel immensely vulnerable have strangers prodding and prying.
Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers, terrible: a death in life.
‘Survivor’ is a game that’s designed to be played with strangers, people with varied backgrounds from all parts of the country. The greatest part is that you can go into the game as anyone you want, hold any job you desire, and portray any personality you can think of.
We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.
It’s awkward: Here you are with most of your clothes off in bed with this person who you’ve really just met. You’re strangers to each other’s bodies and you’re coming together for the first time in front of all these people.
How often are the perpetrators of hate-crimes discovered to be self-loathing? Valued individuals do not strike out against strangers.
Translating any insights I have for strangers’ lives into positive action in my own has proved a challenge. While I’ve learned a lot about what everyone else is thinking, I fail miserably to use such knowledge in my private relationships.
I’m terrified of walking into a room full of people. Sitting down at a dinner table with 15 strangers brings me out in a sweat.
Year after year, the Nobel Awards bring a moment of happiness not only to the recipients, not only to colleagues and friends of the recipients, but even to strangers.
I’m not a food-optional person. People who forget to eat meals are like aliens to me and, even now, in the age of Seamless and Caviar, I have a hard time relying on strangers to feed me.
The only pleasurable part of taking the subway, as everyone will agree, is concocting elaborate fantasies about what it would be like to be married to the most interesting strangers you see there.
I’m not afraid of chaos and I’m happy talking to strangers. I really love not knowing where I’m going.
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 best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family – that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.
It’s a Gen X thing to be okay with going unnoticed or unrated or untouched. To be free from strangers’ expectations, or anger. People got angry at me when I stopped making music because it seemed I was devaluing everything.
A majority of my YouTube friends I’ve made because I made a trip down to California and literally tweeted them saying, ‘Hey! Come over – let’s shoot something!’ And then two strangers will just meet up, talk, and shoot something.
Slang has always moved this way. From Cockney rhyming slang to codes swapped among highwaymen, they’re tribal badges of identity, bonding mechanisms designed to distinguish the initiated, and to keep strangers out.
My earliest memory is of my first day at primary school and the distress of seeing my mother part from me.And being in a room full of strangers – of aliens. I felt that I would never see her again.
To put it simply, people who are strangers to me will come up and say, ‘Are you that guy from that show?’ I’ll be like, ‘Yeah,’ and they’ll say, ‘Oh, nice job.’ And really, for the most part, it’s people showing appreciation for the work you’ve done.
Somebody described it to me the best as when you go in to write a song with two people that you’ve never met, you’re pretty much going in and taking off your pants in front of strangers, so it’s a really weird feeling.
Showing ‘Get Out’ to a room full of strangers and having them react lets them be introspective and see the way certain images affect other people.
On Halloween, kids get to assume, for one night the outward forms of their innermost dread, and they’re also allowed to take candy from strangers – the scariest thing of all.
More and more I think of privatisation as being not just about the takeover of resources and power by corporate interests, but as the retreat of citizens to private life and private space, screened from solidarity with strangers and increasingly afraid or even unable to imagine acting in public.
