Quotes About Subtlety

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

We did our best to conjure up the culinary staples of our culture, but since we were dependent on Chinese markets our food had an unacceptably Chinese tinge, another blow in the gauntlet of our humiliation that left us with the sweet-and-sour taste of unreliable memories, just correct enough to evoke the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone, missing along with the proper variety, subtlety, and complexity of our universal solvent, fish sauce.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

Silence is a form of communication, too. Sometimes less is more.

It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.

Ayrton Senna was an extraordinary racing driver. His skills, craft, subtlety and courage were of such magnitude that he dwarfed his generation of drivers.

Zillah took her arm and led her toward the van. Ann kept her arm squeezed against her body so that his fingers would come into contact with the sideswell of her breast. He didn't move his hand away. Soon she felt his fingers begin to move, subtly caressing her, a forefinger darting out to graze her nipple. The nipple shivered erect

I ventured to remark that it did not look a very secure method of building, upon which Bundy turned his eyeglass on me and smiled knowingly. My dear Doctor, said he, you don't appear to appreciate the subtlety of the method. The purpose of these activities is to create employment. That has been clearly stated by the town council. But if you want to create employment you build a wall that will tumble down and give somebody else the job of putting it up again.

Furtive behavior is always noticed and, when noticed, inevitably raises an alarm. On the other hand, a man acting boldly and directly is viewed as honest and harmless, is not remarked upon, and is later forgotten altogether.

Only farmers and the young, who live dependent upon change, understand what it is to know the continual flowering of life, however subtle.

I tend to like dry humor.

I want to make music that is completely electronic but doesn't feel it.

Look closely. The beautiful may be small.

Diplomacy is to do and say, The nastiest thing in the nicest way.

Diplomacy is to do and say, the nastiest things in the nicest way.

Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.

Chemistry is a funny thing, miss. Sometimes those who are experiencing it aren't always aware they are.

In the first two sections of this book we've focused on safety and vulnerability. We've seen how small signals—You are safe, We share risk here—connect people and enable them to work together as a single entity. But now it's time to ask: What's this all for? What are we working toward? When I visited the successful groups, I noticed that whenever they communicated anything about their purpose or their values, they were as subtle as a punch in the nose.

Sexiness, particularly in movies, is the chess game in the 'Thomas Crown Affair'. It's, it's, I don't know, but Faye Dunaway comes up a lot in that thinking. It's the subtlety of sexiness. The moment you try to be sexy, then it's not.

It's really easy to make a movie that five people understand. It's really hard to make something that a lot of people understand and yet is not obvious, still has subtlety and ambiguity, and leaves you with something to do as a viewer.

You don't want to bash viewers over the head with a blunt message or lecture them - they'd soon get bored with that.

The best kind of marketing messages are the ones that don't seem like marketing messages. Because it means that the viewers' defenses are down.