Top 40 Joel Stein Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Joel Stein

2. “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.”

— Joel Stein

3. “It’s hard to discipline yourself not to explain yourself or apologize.”

— Joel Stein

4. “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.”

— Joel Stein

5. “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.”

— Joel Stein

6. “The people who get places in life just say yes to everything.”

— Joel Stein

7. “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.”

— Joel Stein

8. “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.”

— Joel Stein

9. “Basically, I wake up, take care of my son for a little while, and then like, “I am gonna write!” And then I wind up.”

— Joel Stein

10. “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.”

— Joel Stein

11. “I have a really high bar for being angry. Like, it doesn’t even happen every year.”

— Joel Stein

12. “You’re not going to change anyone’s mind. Especially online.”

— Joel Stein

13. “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.”

— Joel Stein

14. “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.”

— Joel Stein

15. “I always thought that being at Time and tweaking your bosses and exploiting your expense account was just fun. Just joyous.”

— Joel Stein

16. “I love sushi, but I’m not going to write a column about it.”

— Joel Stein

17. “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.”

— Joel Stein

18. “I hate walking up to strangers.”

— Joel Stein

19. “You don’t get anywhere without saying yes.”

— Joel Stein

20. “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.”

— Joel Stein

21. “I can’t imagine deer hunting. I used to think I couldn’t imagine deer hunting because killing a deer seemed so awful. But now I think about just sitting in a tree and doing nothing all day and probably not even seeing a deer. Not moving and sitting in a tree? That seems rough.”

— Joel Stein

22. “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.”

— Joel Stein

23. “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.”

— Joel Stein

24. “I think I realized that Dave Barry was funnier than I’ll ever be, and he made no attempt to make any actual points. He had a general libertarian point of view, but in general, he just liked to make jokes.”

— Joel Stein

25. “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.”

— Joel Stein

26. “Online reaction is very different than real-world reaction.”

— Joel Stein

27. “I wish I’d legitimately talked about some painful moments in my life where I felt insufficient as a kid.”

— Joel Stein

28. “I’ve gotten thicker skin mostly from being older. You just stop caring quite as much about everything.”

— Joel Stein

29. “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.”

— Joel Stein

30. “There have been people who represent something very symbolic and I’ve been freaked out interviewing them.”

— Joel Stein

31. “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.”

— Joel Stein

32. “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.”

— Joel Stein

33. “I would be at home reading, because I felt so disconnected from humanity.”

— Joel Stein

34. “I’ve learned over time that every editor has told me when you’re getting that much hate, you don’t talk about it. You just kind of don’t give it oxygen and let it go away. It’s almost – not always, but almost – always the best policy.”

— Joel Stein

35. “I want to be heavily tied to a city that I write for every week, that knows my stuff and I can interact with.”

— Joel Stein

36. “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.”

— Joel Stein

37. “You can get away with stuff in a one-page story that you can’t get away with in a book.”

— Joel Stein

38. “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.”

— Joel Stein

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

— Joel Stein

40. “You really, really have to care about animals to want to kill one. You have to learn all this stuff about them and start thinking like them.”

— Joel Stein

41. “I don’t read “letters” sections of magazines, but I’ll read anyone’s blog post about me.”

— Joel Stein

42. “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.””

— Joel Stein

43. “Early on, even in college, I figured out that it was just more interesting to me to create content than to write about other people. So that makes it more marketable.”

— Joel Stein

44. “When I lose my column again, I’m sure I’ll get hungry again. Maybe it’s having a kid, but it’s probably just getting to do what I always wanted to do – I’m really not that hungry.”

— Joel Stein