"Because I co-wrote a book about Donald Rumsfeld I’ve been getting a lot of questions about torture recently. I try to explain the point of the book is that once you say it’s OK to torture then you won’t know where to stop. Talking to a newspaper in Australia I pointed out this wasn’t a critique of America, it was a critique of exceptionalism. I said, Anything we’re capable of you’re capable of too. Don’t look at us from your island in the Pacific shaking your head. Some of the most liberal, tolerant, modern societies once slaughtered Jews by the millions. And it wasn’t that long ago."
— Stephen Elliott, The Daily Rumpus
"There’s all these people out there cleaning their houses on the weekend, going shopping during the day, talking on the phone with their parents. They check in with each other. How do they do it? They don’t even pee in the shower. They’re like superheroes and they’re everywhere. You probably know one."
— Stephen Elliott, The Daily Rumpus 21/12/10
"That might seem counterintuitive but I think we’re wrong about this idea of free. There has to be an exchange. All I’ve ever wanted from readers was to be read, but if I printed a thousand books at my own expense and left them lying in cafes that wouldn’t be effective at all. Most readers want to know that someone else was moved enough by the text to invest something of their own."
— Stephen Elliott of The Adderall Diaries fame, in his The Daily Rumpus letter (17 Nov 2010). I think he might be on to something here. The impact of ‘free’ in the Chris Anderson sense is changing, lessening, even, as more and more things do become free.
"It’s internet litter, the mean things people will say when they think you don’t know who they are."
— Stephen Elliott from The Rumpus expressing how I feel about nasty, anonymous comments on the internet. This is real life people, put your name to it.
"Honesty is, of course, no excuse for anything. In San Francisco it’s like a cult. A belief that if you’re open, transparent even, then everything is allowed. Worse still is thinking that someone can grant you permission to do something you know is wrong. But maybe even worse than that is thinking you’ll never do wrong and trying to live like some urban monk, austere, hidden from judgment in your loose fitting ideology, still remarkably dependent on the world’s impression of you."
— Stephen Elliott in his e mail newsletter The Daily Rumpus puts into words what worries me sometimes about my inner-city, coffee-obsessed, earnest-friends life.
