Top 222 Strangers Quotes

Self-improvement books, friends, and polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing, and solving our real problems.

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 find it utterly bizarre that total strangers write about your life in a completely fictional manner.

I try to win the love and approval of strangers, since it didn’t work with my family.

Naming me ‘Twinkle‘ was a foolproof way of making sure that I would get teased throughout my life, have immigration officers at various airports stare at my passport and shake with hysterical laughter, and strangers stalk me with WhatsApp messages like, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, little star, I hope you get hit by a car!’

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?

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.

I’m not afraid of chaos and I’m happy talking to strangers. I really love not knowing where I’m going.

Being a stand-up is my mission in life; it’s my passion. My ongoing goal is to simply be funny, on my own, in front of a roomful of strangers.

For me, there are no my people and strangers, no bad people and good people. All people are equal for me.

I saw ‘Birth‘ at the Sundance Film Festival with a thousand other strangers, and I couldn’t believe that was me in the film. I didn’t recognize myself.

Just being gender non-conforming opens you to trouble from strangers. And violence.

Those who do not put clear limits on migration will soon start to feel like strangers in their own land.

Venting your anger on anyone – especially complete strangers – is not a winning tactic. Be especially sweet to bartenders and people serving you food.

Never lose sight of the fact that the most important yardstick of your success will be how you treat other people – your family, friends, and coworkers, and even strangers you meet along the way.

When I started out, I was very shy, I was terrified of meeting strangers and I hated the lime-light.

In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community‘s armed might as well as its pride of place and clan.

I think, especially in our business we meet a lot of people, and sometimes you spend so much time being nice to strangers, and so, you know, keeping a clear head and just being nice to each other. And that’s all the advice I can give.

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.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

Our very lives depend on the ethics of strangers, and most of us are always strangers to other people.

When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can’t help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you.

In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.

My father was a certain kind of man – I saw how he treated my mother and his family and how he treated strangers. And I vowed I would never make a film that would not reflect properly on my father’s name.

If you are a gay couple living in Alabama, you know one thing: your family has no standing under the law; and it can and will be violated by strangers.

I don’t accept gifts from perfect strangers – but then, nobody’s perfect.

I like the anonymity, the fact that you’re a stranger making strangers laugh. You aren’t forcing them to laugh – it’s involuntary, and that’s when they give the most honest response.

The main purpose of engaging in conversation can no longer be personal advancement or respectability. Instead, I’d like for us to use conversations to create equality, to open ourselves to strangers, and, most practically, to remake our working world.

When you’re talking about a really horrible personal thing that happened to you… and it doesn’t get laughs… I feel really exposed and like I’ve overshared with some 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.

We are no strangers to hurricanes in South Carolina. These storms are part of life, especially in the Lowcountry and all along our coast.

As children, many of us were taught never to talk to strangers. As parents and grandparents, our message must change with technology to include strangers on the Internet.

Polite strangers often tell soothing lies about our physical appearance that prevent many of us from facing, discussing and solving our real problems.

I was painfully shy for a long time. I mean, that’s something I really had to work my way out of. And I really think it was because, after the 2008 Olympics, I spent a whole year bartending. It was the one thing that really forced me to be just not so scared to start conversations with strangers.

‘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.

The tabernacle of unity hath been raised; regard ye not one another as strangers.

How do you live with one person for 13 years and another for eight and find both as alien as strangers?

Ninety per cent of the world’s woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves – so how can we know anyone else?

I am a little nervous with strangers. But I’m not tight inside. I think I am impulsive.

I’m more the sort of person who doesn’t like hugging strangers because we don’t know each other, so we shouldn’t.

I once accidentally ‘replied all’ and sent an email complaining about my then-boyfriend to a bunch of strangers. It was meant for my friend who was a bride, but I ended up addressing her entire wedding party. Her marriage lasted; my relationship didn’t.

People need to spread love towards strangers. We all bleed the same blood and we are all part of a global community now.

People have always taken photos of themselves, either with camera timers or by handing their Nikons over to strangers in foreign countries and then paying large sums to get them back.

People often tell me that they have no idea how I can do standup. The idea of trying to make a large group of strangers laugh is, for many, absolutely petrifying – and it is – but there are ways of gradually developing the material that can ease the fear.

The Iraqi people are some of the warmest people you’ll meet in your life. They are extremely receptive to strangers. Their hospitality is immense.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

I didn’t feel a strong bond with the parents who raised me, and I had anything but a happy childhood. My mother was overly sensitive; my father, ascetic. I was neither. I felt as if I were living with complete strangers. I suspect that my parents felt the same way.

Being on ‘Whitney’ is a job, but stand-up is my life. I could never stop. There’s an art to it. I love having strangers laugh with me, so as long as I can continue doing that, I’ll be happy. Working on a show and collectively sharing ideas with a cast is great, but stand-up is my first love.

I want to live in a place where strangers rush to help someone in distress.

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.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

A nation‘s poets are its true owners; and by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens.

Most people don’t walk around knowing what other people think about them, and I don’t think it’s healthy to know what faceless strangers who you’ll never meet say about you.

Ma did a play called ‘Entertaining Strangers’ when I was about 14, which totally changed my life, I loved it so much.

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.

I am the kind of person that wants to get up in front of crowds of strangers and perform monologues. To each their own.

A good life depends on the strength of our relationships with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and strangers.

Young actors often don’t think of the consequences of doing nudity or sex scenes. They want the role so badly that they agree to be exploited, and then end up embarrassing family, friends, and even strangers.

In TV you are paired up with strangers and it could be a nightmare.

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.

When I joined Nirvana, I was the fifth or sixth drummer – I don’t know if they’d ever had a drummer they were totally happy with. And they were strangers. There was never much of a deeper connection outside of the music.

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night‘s sleep, and strangers’ monologues framed like Russian short stories.

We don’t woo our wives with clubs. We don’t leave old folks on ice floes. And maybe the time has come to quit diving into rip tides to save people we don’t know. We’ve outgrown a lot of survival-of-the-fittest strategies, and risking our lives for strangers might be one of them.

Many people believe that introversion is about being antisocial, and that’s really a misperception. Because actually it’s just that introverts are differently social. So they would prefer to have a glass of wine with a close friend as opposed to going to a loud party full of strangers.

Sharing bad news with strangers is most certainly a selfish act.

I haven‘t lost faith in human nature and I haven’t decided to be less compassionate to strangers.

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.

I don’t care what a lot of anonymous strangers think about restaurants.

I convinced my parents to let me see an agent, but because I had been taught never to speak to strangers, I was so quiet during the interview, they said to bring me back when I was older.

I think everybody‘s had that feeling of sitting in a theater, in a dark room, with other strangers, watching a very powerful film, and they felt that feeling of transformation.

I don’t even know how people managed without the Internet years ago. Having to mail a cassette tape of your music to strangers over the course of months… I just can’t imagine having to do that.

America provided things that form the foundation of who we used to be: the prospect and potential of hope, mercy, and freedom for strangers who came carrying not much more than a determination to survive in a big country with a bigger heart.

Sharing cabs with strangers is weird.

Permission marketing turns strangers into friends and friends into loyal customers. It’s not just about entertainment – it’s about education. Permission marketing is curriculum marketing.

If these men decided that they have to go in there and fight, I want them to send their own children and grandchildren. I want them to not send a bunch of strangers’ kids in there to fight and die.

I was afraid of having to present my big nose to strangers.

I grew up playing with kids who were the kids of people my parents grew up playing with, and they know me like nobody else. I thought everybody was that way when I was growing up, and then I left to go to college, and I realised that the world is full of strangers.

I desperately need the love of complete strangers. That’s one reason I overtip. I love when skycaps, waiters, and valets are happy to see me.

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.

In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies.

Everyone goes through things; everyone has a story. That’s why strangers are so interesting. I don’t find a single human being boring, man.

When I finally returned home after my five-week hospitalization, I could feel the stares of strangers on my bald head and thinning eyebrows. Everywhere I went, cancer spoke for me before I could say the first word.

I was writing this really long joke about the smell of poop, and I was like, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ I started to think about why I was a comedian, and then I came up with a reason for existence, which is: inserting absurdity or stupidity into strangers’ lives in order to make the world a better place.

New Orleans is a great city. My favorite part is the music. I love being to walk on the street and dance with strangers. It’s really fun.

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.

I don’t know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what’s real and what isn’t.

Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not.

How often are the perpetrators of hate-crimes discovered to be self-loathing? Valued individuals do not strike out against strangers.

I’m very fortunate. I loved school and, when I went there, race, gangs and violence were not issues. There was a feeling, gone now, that you had to be presentable. If you hadn’t combed your hair, older black ladies – complete strangers – would come up to you in the street and pull out a comb and straighten your tie.

It’s kind of astonishing that people trust strangers because of words they write on computer screens.

Sri is an introvert. She doesn’t talk to strangers.

Over the years your bodies become walking autobiographies, telling friends and strangers alike of the minor and major stresses of your lives.

How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it’s a digital slate I’m carrying around, trying not to get it all thumbprinty?

I’m quite good, though I say it myself, at making strangers feel at ease.

I want to speak, to sing to total strangers. It’s my way of talking to the world.

For the cable news guest, nothing happens for a while until suddenly everything happens very quickly. After you receive your television face, you stand around for a while, ignored, until you’re sat down at a desk and asked to argue with strangers.

If, by chance, you were to meet me at the Casablanca airport or on a boat sailing from Tangiers, you would think me self-confident, but I am not. Even now, at my age, I am frightened when crossing borders because I am afraid of failing to understand strangers.

When strangers walk up to me and want to play golf for money, I worry. I wonder why they’re coming to me, and I begin asking questions: When did you start playing? What’s your best score? Are you playing your best golf right now? Where do you play? Usually I can tell if they’re lying.

My everyday life in which I do exactly the same things as everyone else should not inspire people, and yet I am constantly congratulated by strangers for simply existing.

That’s a central part of philosophy, of ethics. What do I owe to strangers? What do I owe to my family? What is it to live a good life? Those are questions which we face as individuals.

Strangers still leave me self-conscious.

I resisted Twitter for a long time. To me, it was synonymous with networking, which in my mind means unceasing self-promotion and superficial small-talk with strangers. A little like wading into a river with a raging current – and I’m a terrible swimmer.

People actually have the nerve to ask me if I want to go to a haunted house. Why would I want to go to a place where I have to pay my money for creepy strangers to be able to harass me without legal repercussions?

I was broke when I lived in New York City during college, so I’d spend weekends walking around town, grabbing something to eat, and interacting with strangers. That ritual has stuck with me.

If you want to go out and see a movie and sit in a dark room with strangers, it’s not an experience you can replicate at home.

It’s weird how people who are the least close to me or who’ve never even met me purport to be experts on the real me; and then, sadly, there are those who could be in touch with me but prefer to gossip with strangers about me instead.

Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you’re really strangers.

In Italy, my wife and I always said we feel like strangers because there’s maybe only a couple other people from other parts of the world. Here in Chicago, there’s millions of people from Poland, thousands from Japan, hundreds from Croatia. We like it here.

Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.

I used to tweet, but it’s an act of futility. You’re not really making any impact, and if you find yourself in a mood when you wanna be a bit controversial and you post something, you suddenly realise, ‘Oh my God!’ because you’ve opened yourself up to a bunch of criticism from strangers.

We need to demystify – get out and speak to strangers on the street.

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.’

The best fights don’t occur between strangers. They occur between friends who trust each other.

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.

Fueled by the kindness and generosity of strangers, ‘Food for the Poor’ builds houses for people.

I’ve become a little immune to the gazes of strangers because it’s been a part of my life for so long.

My column launched while I was in the bone marrow transplant unit. And I remember waking up the next morning and opening my inbox and seeing hundreds of emails from strangers all around the world.

Ultimately, it has been a struggle- but I was in Minneapolis and Austin a couple of weeks ago, sitting in theaters with complete strangers watching this weird movie that Kirk and I thought up and I was excited to be making film.

Admiration and familiarity are strangers.

But there were women in the world, and from them each of our heroes had taken to himself a wife. The good ladies were no strangers to the prowess of their husbands. and, strange as it may seem, they presumed a little upon it.

I have sometimes felt pressure to dress a certain way because of everyone else. You know what I mean? Girls in high school and strangers on the street have put way more pressure on me to dress a certain way than my mom or dad.

In Vancouver, you have to lock your doors – not for strangers, but for bears.

I have not come to having a healthy ego through being complimented by Internet strangers, I was born that way.

I looked in the audience. There were no strangers. Everybody was singing and cheering and hugging. That was a beautiful picture to look at.

There’s nothing like the freedom of being in a roomful of strangers and trying to make them laugh… You either sink or swim. It’s like verbal boxing.

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.

I like test screenings. I like to see a movie with an audience of strangers. I think it tells you a lot.

Some days, I would find what seemed like entire family trees, torn from once-treasured albums and dumped in disorganized bins, selling 10 for a dollar. I wondered how people could give up pictures of their great-grandparents for complete strangers to paw through – or why complete strangers would want them.

Suddenly you’re surrounded by strangers who want something from you. The thing is, they don’t know what they want, and you don’t know what they want, unless it’s an autograph, and you just sort of stand there grinning at one another.

‘Humans of New York’ is basically somebody walking up to absolute strangers on the street every day and, within minutes, talking with them about very personal things. Some things they haven’t even told their best friends or family members.

What firefighters and people in our military and cops do is separate from what the rest of us do; basically these people say, ‘I’m going to protect all these strangers.’

I’d say I’m the opposite of someone that has the urge to stand in front of strangers and make them laugh, but the idea of getting up and telling a story and people finding it amusing always appealed to me.

Rooming with six strangers and having my life taped for MTV’s groundbreaking reality series, ‘The Real World‘, in the nation’s most liberal city was a formative experience for a young, Hispanic, conservative, Catholic girl from the Southwest.

Theater is my temple and my religion and my act of faith. Strangers sit in a room together and believe together.

I really hate being recognised. I’m quite a shy person, and I’m not very good at talking to strangers. So when people come up to me in the street, I just find it quite awkward. I don’t really know what to say to them.

Instead of showing strangers kindness and giving them the benefit of the doubt, we increasingly show them only fear, and that is bad for us and them.

I can’t imagine finding success and then moving to a building in Manhattan with 300 strangers, like a bunch of little ants going home at night.

I sometimes read on the subway, but I’m a hopeless eavesdropper and get easily distracted by strangers’ conversations.

I was on holiday in Morocco and in the middle of nowhere some random strangers suddenly shouted out ‘T4!’ It was so out of the blue; l was terrified for a minute!

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.

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

Talk to strangers. They’re never who you think they are at first.

As an individual, I need space and can’t be locked in a house with strangers. I would do ‘Bigg Boss‘ if I get to co-host it with Salman Khan.

You can’t stop people watching on mobiles, but I hope the old fashioned idea of sitting in a dark room with a big screen with a group of strangers lives on forever.

Occasionally, family members treat each other with less courtesy and kindness than they do acquaintances or even strangers.

I think when ‘Perfect Strangers’ landed and was so well received, it was a magic moment.

It has been one of my difficulties, in arguing this question out of doors with friends or strangers, that I rarely find any intelligible agreement as to the object of the war.

I know my mother has always looked at strangers as friends.

When I’m working with strangers, I can get a little timid or scared. With friends, I’m willing to’ try anything, because there’s a lot of trust involved.

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

I would say that my fatal flaw, as a human being, is that I need people to like me, and if they don’t like me, I will obsess over it – and try to change my personality until they like me – even if they don’t like me for reasons that have nothing to do with me, and even if they’re strangers.

To the general public in America, the lifespan of Deep Purple probably finished with our 1984 album, ‘Perfect Strangers.’

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 the person who will go to a wedding and switch the place cards around because I don’t want to sit next to someone I don’t know, because I’m so bad at chatting to strangers.

I love talking, even to strangers.

The Queen is distant towards strangers. But with friends and family she can be very funny.

I’m good at what I do and still improving as I learn from mentors, founders, partners, friends, family, strangers, my own investors, and the experience itself.

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.

Complete strangers can stand silent next to each other in an elevator and not even look each other in the eye. But at a concert, those same strangers could find themselves dancing and singing together like best friends. That’s the power of music.

I’m very, very private; I don’t enjoy talking about myself to strangers. Particularly strangers with tapes going.

When strangers start acting like neighbors… communities are reinvigorated.

To work with someone you love is something special, an incredible experience. But it could be a negative. You have to make a strong commitment to be honest; you’re not just being polite, like strangers on an airplane; you’re working.

If had a penny for every strange look I’ve gotten from strangers on the street I’d have about 10 to 15 dollars, which is a lot when you’re dealing with pennies.

If you age with somebody, you go through so many roles – you’re lovers, friends, enemies, colleagues, strangers; you’re brother and sister. That’s what intimacy is, if you’re with your soulmate.

When we cut ‘Strangers In The Night,’ we did the whole song in two takes.

I couldn’t have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother’s death. The renewed energy, the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

When I was talking to strangers over the Internet in the 1990s, there would be a much more intense connection because they’re disembodied, so it’s just your brain and your soul interacting with this other person, and it just frees you up in this incredibly empowering way.

You have to make a character of yourself if you’re going to be known to strangers.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a sucker for weddings. I’ll get misty-eyed watching the union of two perfect strangers. But in some cases – and I need to stress some cases – I feel like we’re getting blindsided by the spectacle of it all.

With a smartphone in tow and a playlist humming, a runner may miss the crunch of leaves underfoot, the enthusiastic cheers of benevolent strangers, or even her own breath. And, for many runners, leaving the mobile device at home is the most liberating part of the sport.

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

I don’t often meet with strangers and feel okay about collaborating with them.

I realized I was trained my whole life to be an accommodating person, to make sure that everybody is comfortable before I’m comfortable. After giving so much of myself to strangers, I learned to care for myself a little more, especially on tour.

My dad loves to be talked about, good or bad. He just loves it. He’s not even hearing the content, he’s just hearing him. When I’m onstage, he’s looking at the audience members and can’t believe that there are strangers listening to me, and he’s just delighted by the whole thing.

Because of my capacity for listening to strangers’ tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone.

I just constantly tell myself that I should be the only one to define my worth and what I’m capable of and how I perceive myself. And that I should never source that worth from other people, especially strangers on social media. They don’t know who I am, the length of my journey, who I am as a person.

Get your product in front of actual, living, breathing strangers. Your college roommate’s approval does not mean there’s market demand.

But they who give straight judgements to strangers and to those of the land and do not transgress what is just, for them the city flourishes and its people prosper.

It’s also selfish because it makes you feel good when you help others. I’ve been helped by acts of kindness from strangers. That’s why we’re here, after all, to help others.

There is only one act of violence in ‘The Strangers’ and it comes at the very, very end… the movie could have worked just as well if we didn’t see it, in my opinion.

We need to be smarter than our smart phones and realize the people we are with are more important than the people we aren’t with, and way more important than the strangers we hope will tweet and like and share and Instagram whatever we’re sending out into the cybersphere.

To an outsider, Abilene was like a small landfall in the Sargasso Sea – remote, laconic, and forever closed to strangers.

There’s no law against asking strangers about their lives and feelings, although sometimes it really feels like there is.

It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.

One of the things that I miss about Canada is that even the strangers, you have an immediate rapport, there’s just an understanding that we’re all good people, let’s be nice to each other. And Kiwis have that. I find the Kiwis have that.

I used to just go up to strangers and tell them really elaborate stories about who I was and where I was from and try to spice my story, which I didn’t think was very exciting at all. That gave me a sense of life, a sense of excitement – but I don’t do that anymore.

As I travelled around Australia, strangers in pubs, on airplanes, in beach parking lots would bring up Gina Rinehart, not knowing I was writing about her. Everybody had something to say, some of it thoughtful, some of it poorly informed, some of it vividly obscene.

I used to get a sort of sociophobia, and I still get it sometimes these days when I’m in a confined space with too many people. It’s not like I freak out or anything, it’s just that I’m far more comfortable in my own company sometimes than being surrounded by one thousand strangers.

We are not strangers to poverty in New Mexico.

Paradoxically, since gay men rarely have gay parents, cultural transmission must come from friends or strangers (a problem since the generations so seldom mix in gay life).

Finding your soul begins by discovering our ability to listen! Alternatively, by sharing a smile, a laugh and just by being human to everyone – from friends, colleagues, family, and especially strangers, including those who are not from the same station in life as you.

Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.

I really love weddings. You are surrounded by people who are strangers and then after you say ‘I do’ those strangers become family.

If two friends ask you to judge a dispute, don’t accept, because you will lose one friend; on the other hand, if two strangers come with the same request, accept because you will gain one friend.

Well after ‘Fast Car’ was so huge, everyone was asking me, ‘What’s the next song?’ At the time I just had ideas I was working on, but it was very clear I needed to finish another song ASAP, and that’s how ‘Perfect Strangers’ came about.

We can bring positive energy into our daily lives by smiling more, talking to strangers in line, replacing handshakes with hugs, and calling our friends just to tell them we love them.

The funny thing is, strangers still seem to feel comfortable coming up to me and saying things, but now usually it’s because they recognize me, and they say nice things.

There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.

When the vast majority of strangers you interact with are trolls on social media, it slowly begins to chip away at your love for humanity.

Chronically insecure people easily lose their altruism, tolerance, and respect for non-conformity. If they have no alternative on offer, they can be led to attribute their plight to strangers in their midst.

On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.

I’m fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform acts of courage, sacrifice, and compassion for total strangers.

Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.

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.

I love scary movies! My two favorites are pretty neck and neck: ‘The Orphanage‘ and ‘The Strangers.’

Sometimes I don’t want to stand around a room full of strangers, chitchatting about nothing, so I’ll come late to a party – and leave early. Though now that I’m saying this in a magazine, I’ll probably never be invited to another one.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

My faith is a huge part of my life. I don’t force it into my music, but it’s in my experiences, so it comes through. People pick up on what they want to pick up on, but any way strangers connect to a song that I wrote is awesome.

We lie more to strangers than we lie to co-workers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people.

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.

I’m hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career – they are so fun and witty.

I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I’m brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile.

For this reason, strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness.

Most non-New Yorkers, finding themselves within hearing range of strangers’ conversation, think it’s nice to pretend they didn’t hear. But many New Yorkers think it’s nice to toss in a relevant comment.

Again, as egotistical as I am, as self-centered as I am, and as much as I love strangers idolizing me, I find it very crass to be self-promoter in a way.

Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.

Young adults love to play games and they’re thirsty for social interaction, but a lot of bar and restaurant experiences are quite unsatisfactory on the social level. What young people need is a place that has the feel of an unhosted party where they find themselves interacting with like-minded strangers.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the idea that strangers know who I am. I don’t know if I want to.

London audiences are the most challenging around – it’s a group of such diverse strangers.

It’s just astonishing to me, but not surprising in some respects, how dependent we are on the somewhat meaningless and certainly ephemeral feedback that we get from strangers on the Internet. I think that’s a dangerous dependence to develop.

I hope fans walk away still feeling like their batteries are charged. I want fans walking away high-fiving strangers.