Joel Stein Quotes

I have a really high bar for being angry. Like, it doesn't even happen every year.

I've gotten thicker skin mostly from being older. You just stop caring quite as much about everything.

Firefighter is one of the few jobs kind enough to warn me away by containing two words I'm not interested in, unlike the deceptive bookkeeper.

It's hard to discipline yourself not to explain yourself or apologize.

I can't imagine what someone would write that would infuriate me. Maybe if my loved one had died of some disease and someone was insensitive, that would piss me off.

Reporting in general makes me pretty nervous. But I realized: all the amazing work experiences of my life were thanks to reporting. So that forces you to go do it.

When wine drinkers tell me they taste notes of cherries, tobacco and rose petals, usually all I can detect is a whole lot of jackass.

I don't read the "letters" section of Time magazine. I think it's just my habit as a reader. I don't read comments on stories, in general.

I'm not that clued into what people are that touchy about and how many of them there are and how niche these niches are.

I can't explain why I don't read comments. Maybe because I worked at Time for so long and they don't have them, so I keep forgetting that they're there.

I hate walking up to strangers.

I think the local food movement has been taken to idiotic extremes. And so I wrote about that and people got pissed.

When I get real big volumes of hate mail, it's usually because I wrote something poorly. But it's also because some group told people to e-mail me and those people didn't read the article, they read the post about what I wrote about. And they all e-mail me. And they all come around at the same time.

I don't like to be in the forest. It's a weird thing. I've learned to have a general appreciation for nature, which has taken a while. But the forest, I still don't really love.

People are different in different situations and people are different online than they are in real life.

I never thought to look at the New York Times one, even though I knew people were pissed off. I've seen YouTube videos from people who are pissed off at me about that and that takes a lot of effort to go find.

You don't get anywhere without saying yes.

Do you know how long it takes to charm people from Maine? They're uptight white people coated with a hard exterior made from other uptight white people.

If you're at my level and you go to a bookstore, even a good turnout is not that many people. Sometimes it is. But for the most part, it's not a huge turnout.

With a Q&A, you need obviously to keep it snappy.

The fun thing about journalism is if you go do a story about something, you can now ask three intelligent questions about it. Or say three intelligent things. And that gets people talking.

The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.

People would ask if I wanted to host things and I was like, "No, I'm a writer, I don't host things." Just thinking I wouldn't be good at it - which is true - but also just wanting to hold on to some part of my identity.

I've definitely written people e-mails telling them I've loved their stories, but that seems more like a professional journalist thing to do.

I have some idea that if I pick on [boy band] One Direction, I'll get a ton of hate mail, because I know that when you're 15, you love a band like you will kill people. But I don't quite realize that that's true about people - adults - who read The Hunger Games.

To defend my fear of sudden change, I chose to believe that life was incremental, that the tiny decisions you make every day determine your fate, that your job is to captain an enormous ship subtly into ever-clearer waters. But that's not how it works at all. Life occurs in moments. You get into college. You propose. You get the job. You get cancer. You get fired. She leaves you ... Because I was born in a stable country at a stable time, I falsely extrapolated that change is incremental. But if you zoom out just a little bit, you see that life is soccer, not basketball. It's revolution, invention, war. It's big bangs, exploding stars, asteroids killing the dinosaurs. Which means that all the action is in the risk taking, whether I want it to be or not.

When Time got rid of my column, I thought it was all over. It was really sad. And then, I just started pushing it to lots of places. And I thought someone would run my column, I thought it was popular, and no one wanted it.

I try to see what that person is thinking or feeling about that particular day. I just get more of a sense of what that person's like and hopefully it's more interesting than a normal conversation.

I'm good at marketing myself through the columns. But compared to other people I know, as far as networking and pushing yourself out there, I'm not very good at that.

As journalism dies, I kind of feel like I want some skills besides writing. I'd like to be able to write movies or host TV shows or whatever. Things that I might actually not inherently like quite as much, but are interesting and fun things to do. A good backup plan.

You don't really want an army of people making individual decisions. And I don't think I completely understood that until people gave me examples of what happens when your army takes over your government and it's like, "Oh, yeah, I guess you can't really have people make individual moral decisions."

What I wound up doing, which I think is really journalistically dubious, is changing the order of some of the things I did, so that the things I ended up struggling with the most wind up being two-thirds of the way in.

You have to live among rich liberals to understand what they're saying. You'll never believe what they mean by 'middle class.' They mean themselves.

There have been people who represent something very symbolic and I've been freaked out interviewing them.

If New Vegas foretells something about America's future, then the culture wars are all but over, and culture lost.