Talking Quotes - Page 70

It is a great advantage for any man to be able to talk or hear, neither ignorantly nor absurdly, upon any subject; for I have known people, who have not said one word, hear ignorantly and absurdly; it has appeared by their inattentive and unmeaning faces.

I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book.

I like talking. I didn't know at the time I would have to worry so much about my hair.

Talking about one's feelings defeats the purpose of having those feelings. Once you try to put the human experience into words, it becomes little more than a spectator sport. Everything must have a cause, and a name. Every random thought must have a root in something else.

I know it may seem surprising to people, but learning dialog that has a conversational flow to it is not that difficult.

We can't profess love without talking through hand puppets.

She was a stirrer of the pot, a lover of intrigue and distress, a creature who seemed to draw oxygen from the spectacle of people at each other's throat, everybody in a state of upset and talking about her.

...If there's a noise in the woods, and there's nobody around to hear it, is it really a noise?" "Of course it is," she replied calmly. "How did you reach that conclusion?" Beldin demanded. "Because there's no such thing as an empty place, uncle. There are always creatures around --wild animals, mice, insects, birds --and they can all hear." "But what if there weren't? What if the woods are truly empty?" "Why waste your time talking about an impossibility?

By the time Talking Heads were starting, my feeling was to throw out everything and start from scratch onstage; strip it down to as close to zero as you can get and then you can make it yours.

Bill Clinton pandered by telling you what you wanted to hear. John Kerry panders by never telling you what you don't want to hear. This is negative pandering; he talks a lot without really ruling anything out so you can draw your own conclusions.....Kerry has been talking for years, and yet such is the thicket of his verbiage that he has achieved almost complete strategic ambiguity.

Talking is something you can't do judiciously unless you keep in practice.

They do a lot of talking, but I'm not sure they actually understand each other.

So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.

You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it's precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly.

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. I am talking about a gung-ho attitude that says 'we can change things here, we can achieve awesome goals, we can be the best. 'Spare me the grim litany of the 'realist;' give me the unrealistic aspirations of the optimist any day.

A huge amount of our everyday thinking - powerful, creative, and resonant stuff - is done socially: talking to other people, arguing with them, relying on them to recall information for us.

No matter how their leaders may have tried to skimp on money, no one, not even the politicians, who talked themselves red, white, and blue in the face, skimped on effort.

My writing has to excite people and depict or include their experiences. That's part of my process - to go out and interact with people. It's very much like an archival process. I understand that the Brothers Grimm would go out and get people talking so they could document folk tales that weren't being documented any other way. I try to offer a little bit of myself - some experience from my life that evokes stories in other people.

I'm talking about when you're nearer the end of your life than the beginning. Now what do you think you think about then? The future? In the future I'm going to do this? Become that? What future? No. What you think is, 'How will I be regarded in the end?'

We knew we were talking about spies. I knew he knew I knew. I was digging my own grave.

If I'm talking to a photographer, I'm talking to a stylist, I'm talking to a makeup artist, we're kind of creating and collaborating and making something that is artwork and is special and is different.

If you're a humble person, and you walk in, and you start talking, people are going to be able to tell. You can't fake it.

Sanctions and negotiations can be very ineffective, and indeed foolish, unless the people you are talking with and negotiating with and trying to reach agreements with are people who can be trusted to keep their word.

Talking about stepping down in five years is frankly not a topic of particular actuality now.

I have a huge Lego collection - I have a really big Lego collection. We're talking pretty darn large. I also have a huge collection of original stainless steel Thomas the Tank Engine train toys. Beautiful little trains; they're my favorite thing in the world.