Quotes from Tom Junod

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.

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

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

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.

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.

You learn a lot about America when you own a pit bull. You learn not just who likes your dog; you learn what kind of person likes your dog - and what kind of person fears him.

We might accept pit bulls personally, but America still doesn't accept them institutionally, where it counts; indeed, apartment complexes and insurance companies are arrayed in force against them.

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

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.

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

The only restaurants in which you're actually happy to be served your entree are the restaurants that serve entrees ungarlanded by Chef's ambition - sushi joints and steakhouses.

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.

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

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.

I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister's wedding. My sister didn't have a wedding.

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.

The suits are as similar as uniforms, and yet you can tell their individual qualities by how they respond to movement - the good ones ripple like wheat in a field and provide not a show of monotony but rather a spectacle of plenty.

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.

That there is as yet no drug for immortality - or, for that matter, for muscle growth in the infirm - does not mean that immortality is theoretically or even technically impossible.

There is certainly no want of journalistic ambition among the purveyors of what is now called 'long-form,' nor of novelistic technique brought to bear on nonfiction, nor of outrage.

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.

The child stars who emerged from Disney boot camp and dominated pop culture in the late '90s and '00s are not only still around but also have spawned successors who have proven even more indispensable to the business of music, movies, and television.

I'd never met Philip Seymour Hoffman, never knew anyone who knew him, never even read a passably revealing magazine profile of him.