Poverty is an anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
I think the people get that I'm just kind of an anomaly in a certain way.
I was an anomaly because my father was a Harvard man, and he came from a family of poor people.
Success made me self-sufficient, but it also took away my anonymity. I'm just this quiet nobody, and all of a sudden people are nervous around me. That was kind of weird.
Does anybody like being recognized? I understand that it's my job. I'm grateful about people who are moved enough by the work to want to say something. But I mourn the loss of anonymity.
I'm a little hibernating animal. Anonymity is one of my favorite things. I mean, that's why I moved to New York when I was like 18, because there, there are just so many people that there's no one and you're just lost. You're completely invisible and I find that very liberating.
The new freedom of expression brought by the Internet goes far beyond politics. People relate to each other in new ways, posing questions about how we should respond to people when all that we know about them is what we have learned through a medium that permits all kinds of anonymity and deception.
To me, constructive criticism is when people take ownership of their ideas. That's why I don't listen to anything that's anonymous. But it's hard; when there's something hurtful out there, I still want to read it over and over and memorize it and explain my point of view to the person.
I actually went to some Gamblers Anonymous classes, and I sat there for three or four of them, and I'm trying to figure out what I have in similarities with these other people, and I could never find anything. It just seems like it wasn't the right place for me.
Sometimes you want to go for a walk and you don't want to be watched. You just want to be anonymous and blend in. Especially when I travel, I feel that way, because I can't really go out and see a city the way other people can and I miss out on a lot.
No-one really feels self-confident deep down because it's an artificial idea. Really, people aren't that worried about what you're doing or what you're saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persecuted and examined. Liberate yourself from that idea that people are watching you.
We don't make movies for critics. I've done four movies; there's millions upon millions upon millions of people who've paid to see them. Somebody likes them. My greatest joy is to sit anonymously in a dark theater and watch it with an audience, a paying audience.
There's all sorts of stuff people want to publish anonymously.
We live in a culture where everyone's opinion, view, and assessment of situations and people spill across social media, a lot of it anonymously, much of it shaped by mindless meanness and ignorance.
Good priests never look for awards and, perversely enough in the clerical culture universe, do not receive many. Like the aged nuns who taught selflessly and nearly anonymously all their lives, these servants of the People of God only get into the papers when their obituaries are printed.
I'll literally pay three Hollywood readers who don't know me to read my scripts under the radar and give cold comments. And at the early screenings of my movies, I'll hand out questionnaires that can be filled out anonymously so people can be brutally honest because, to your face, they won't be.
The Internet's like one big bathroom wall with a lot of people who anonymously can say really mean things. It's fine, I believe in freedom of speech and I think people should think what they want, but I don't care to hear it.
I like to make colored xeroxes of things. I clip out pictures of Liza Minelli and her husband from magazines and I fax them to people anonymously.
What if people could use the Internet to create a new kind of money, one that didn't involve governments and central banks and could be used anonymously, like cash?
Some people are born skinny, and that's just the way it is. You can't point a finger at them and say they're ill or anorexic. It isn't fair to people born that way.
