We used to think, 'I have a feeling; I want to make a call.' Now our impulse is, 'I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text.'

It is painful to watch children trying to show off for parents who are engrossed in their cell phones. Children are nostalgic for the 'good old days' when parents used to read to them without the cell phone by their side or watch football games or Disney movies without having the BlackBerry handy.

Loneliness is failed solitude.

I don't tell a story unless I have a very deep bench. If you tell an idiosyncratic story, there's no resonance. People read it and say, "I don't see anyone like that." So I tell a story only when I have many stories behind it.

I think few people of education enter politics because it seems like a contact blood sport.

We expect more from technology and less from each other. We create technology to provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.

We will continue to live in a form in which we become cyborg. Either we download our information to a machine or we incorporate so many machine parts that we don't know where we end and the machine begins.