Top 55 Tom Junod Quotes

Of course, Google specializes in coming up with ideas, professes the highest ideals, and is dedicated to solving the world’s problems.

Bob Dylan is either the most public private man in the world or the most private public one. He has a reputation for being silent and reclusive; he is neither.

Weddings have become an expression not just of our desires but also our ambitions, and so more and more the food at weddings is like the food everywhere else, with the ingredients parsed for purity and the preparation praised for ingenuity and the sushi chef standing where the carving table used to be.

A lot of people like to say that they have trouble getting gifts. I have trouble giving them. It’s not out of a lack of generosity, mind you. My fallback is to go big, no matter what the occasion.

Conservatives still attack feminism with the absurd notion that it makes its adherents less attractive to men; in truth, it is feminism that has made forty-two-year-old women so desirable.

His name was Fred Rogers. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, and his parents, because they were wealthy, had bought something new for the corner room of their big redbrick house. It was a television.

Ask people who know him for a description of Bob Dylan outside the prerogatives of fame and the obligations of art, and they have to stop and think; there’s just not that much left.

It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.

I was a bully in fifth and sixth grade. I wasn’t one of the bullies – I wasn’t strong or dominant enough to be one of the kids who bullied everyone in equal measure. I was a bully, in that I bullied a kid, whose name I won’t mention here. My bullying was selective and personal.

Music and television are turning into the equivalent of gymnastics and tennis: sports built entirely around the identification and training of prodigies.

My mother was not a country girl. She was a Brooklyn girl, born and raised in Flatbush, and then a Long Island girl, who liked shopping, ‘a little glitter’ in her clothes, and keeping secret the actual color of her hair, which from the day I was born to the day she died, was the ‘platinum blonde’ of Jean Harlow’s.

I have about 25,000 songs on my computer and play them mostly on shuffle, which means that the songs I’ve played the most are the songs that have been on my computer the longest.

I collect songs because I want to control what I – what everybody within earshot – listens to.

Mark Zuckerberg is the product of Facebook just as surely as Facebook is the product of Mark Zuckerberg.

Music subscriptions will eventually replace music collections because the digital universe is oriented against the idea of ownership – because music ownership is itself the eight-track of the Internet.

I never met Lou Reed, never was one of those journalists lucky enough to be the object of his derision, contempt, condescension, indifference, and occasional piercing honesty.

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

I forget what I wore for my first encounter with Mark Zuckerberg. I know it wasn’t a suit – that would have seemed out of place in the rigorously casual world of Facebook. I probably wore what I usually wear, a pair of jeans and a Gap T-shirt, maybe my black sneakers.

The two biggest meals of your life you don’t have to cook and you don’t get to eat. The first you don’t eat because no man eats – or cares what he eats – at his wedding. The second you don’t eat because, well, no man eats at his funeral, either.

There are no foodies at funerals.

I am the guilty gift-giver, which means that I am a gift-giver who lacks all sense of proportion.

Before the Beatles could give us ‘The White Album’, they had to achieve disorienting success.

Now, I was one of those kids who grew up privy to both his parents’ secrets, who acted as the intermediary between them and eased their estrangements: that was my function in the household.

That’s the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah’s witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.

I love many of the rock and rollers next up on altar of actuarial sacrifice more than I ever loved David Bowie.

But stories don’t only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.

And you understand something: that although, like all American eaters, you’ve been conditioned to think of the entree as the climax of the meal, it never is. It is, indeed, almost always disappointing, especially if you order fish.

The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale – the scale of sample size and of time – will truth emerge.

I was not a fan. Moreover, I reveled in not being a fan, as though not being able to tolerate Robin Williams was one of the things by which I defined myself.

I remember George Jones singing on television, but not any of the songs he sang. What I remember was my visceral reaction to him, the intensity of my distaste.

It sounds lonely being Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan likes being around other Bob Dylans, and there are not many other Bob Dylans around.

It is hard to decide whether Mark Zuckerberg is the most interesting boring person in the world or the most boring interesting one.

You don’t have to love cooking to cook, but you have to do more than love baking to bake. You have to bake out of love.

We are trained to distinguish between journalism that’s short and long, that’s responsible and irresponsible, that stands for the right values and stands for the wrong.

Like most people, I like to give what I like to get. Unlike most people, I still like to get what I got in college – books, magazine subscriptions, CDs, T-shirts.

When a cocker spaniel bites, it does so as a member of its species; it is never anything but a dog. When a pit bull bites, it does so as a member of its breed. A pit bull is never anything but a pit bull.

I am an adoptive parent. My wife and I adopted our daughter nine years ago. She was born in China. We have been her parents since she was nine and a half months old, and we don’t know very much about her life before we first took her into our arms.

I had heard a lot of stories about my father and celebrities, most of them from his own mouth. In his stories, famous women flirted with him outrageously and helplessly, and famous men sought his company, paid him deference, or took umbrage after being upstaged by him.

Wearing a suit can seem like a somewhat archaic gesture, a concession to formality in a determinedly casual age.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers. His name was Fred Rogers.

We live in the golden age of character actors – in an age when actors who have done their time in character roles are frequently asked to carry dark movies and complicated television dramas.

Character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini have found themselves getting more and more leading roles because they are permitted to behave onscreen in ways that George Clooney and Matt Damon never could.

Without your data, Google couldn’t pursue the dream of trying to figure out what you’re really thinking when you’re asking a question, of trying to discern, from the imprecision of your language, the exact answer you’re looking for.

Josh Ozersky was a meat man. He knew meat, revered it, studied it, sang it, evangelized it, wrote about it, and, of course, ate it. Lots of it. Life, for Josh, was meat, and writing. Everything else was a side.

Any child can tell you what Google does – Google gives you the answers. But Google doesn’t, not really.

My parents were ambitious people, my father especially, whose entire life was devoted to rising above, but his ambitions were defeated long before death finished them off, and so when he died, he came back to where he started, but he didn’t come back home, because there was no home to come back to.

We love football because the game of football is better than it has ever been, and is somehow managing to attain, at the same time, an apogee of opprobrium and excellence.

My ten-year-old daughter loves gifts. She loves to give them and she loves to get them. She loves to give them when she’s hurt her parents’ feelings, and she loves to get them when her parents have hurt hers.

For a long time, New Orleans was the classic-rock station of American cuisine, its reputation for flamboyance belying its playlist conservatism.

By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don’t grow up at all. And neither do we.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn’t like himself very much. It was not his fault. He was born with cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain. It means that you can think but sometimes can’t walk, or even talk.