George Steiner Quotes

Drugs seem to turn people into paranoid bores. Why would anyone want to go there?

If a man be gloomy let him keep to himself. No one has the right to go croaking about society, or what is worse, looking as if he stifled grief.

It's just as difficult to live in a self-made hell of privacy as it is to live in a self-made hell of publicity.

Anything that you can become obsessed with, and you do so much that you don't do the things you need to do with family, friends, school, job - that can be an addiction. And texting absolutely can qualify.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

'Dear Society' really is my letter to society where I express the anguish I've been caused from such an image-based industry and culture we live in.

I don't smoke a lot of pot anymore. No one wants to hang around a guy who ends every sentence with, "Do you guys hate me?"

We will not solve the addiction problem in America if we don't address social connection.

When I was drinking I was thinking I was having a good time but it came back twice as bad, the depression. It was just a vicious circle - drinking, not caring about myself - and it gave me a bad low.

When it comes to our relationship with loneliness, specifically, it's important to understand how our relative introversion or extroversion informs our preference for social interaction.

I've always found, give me a pack of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and I do better with that than I do with torture.

I saw in my life what pushed a lot of people to drugs was being an outcast to society, so being gay I related to that.

I don't design stories to fit some political ideology. I design stories about characters who I love and care about, while trying to make sense of an increasingly mad and toxic and insane world.

I meet with retired football players. Some are well-dressed, some are well-spoken, but when you talk to them personally, they will admit to you that they are having problems. But they are managing their problems. They have impaired memory, they're having mood problems. They are being treated by their psychiatrists.

I spent the majority of my teenage years in hospitals, rehabs and halfway houses.

In the back of my mind for many years, I had always felt that my relationship with alcohol, although seemingly harmless was unhealthy and somewhat destructive.

I feel like an alien. I feel people don't like me. People behaved strangely after 'Rockstar.'

I had a period in my life where I decided that I would never be bored again and that, if I had any free time at all, I would make plans, and I would always be doing things. It actually was great for a year or so, but then I lost all of my friends.

The nameless loser in Jay McInerney's 'Bright Lights, Big City' is going to the dogs like a gentleman. He is too smart to blame anyone for the impasse he has come to, hip enough to know he does not know enough, too sophisticated to masquerade as an anti-hero.

The homeless often lose trust in people: in the hospital doctors, who had no choice but to discharge them back on to the streets, and in the family members from whom they have become estranged. Their past use of the NHS can make it difficult to patch together a full medical history.

Rock bands are not exactly magnets of functional people.

With rock n' roll and touring comes a lot of good and bad decisions. These guys who are 21, they're out there, and they're not indestructible. The history of rock n' roll tells us, and so a lot of these guys are on this road to destruction.

All I do is work, work, work.

There were times when I got frightened. Things weren't going right, so I just went out and got smashed. That's me. Something goes wrong, I find a bottle. I don't like it about myself but I've done it before and I'll do it again. But I never vanished for days or held up shooting or quit the picture.

Exhibitionists have no friends, no friends at all.