Quotes About Communication

There was a time when the one singular thing that held a marriage together was the threat of getting the kids.

In Russia, as I sat there day after day wearing headphones, listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words relevant, I wondered if we could establish meaningful rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance in dark glasses on TV...never had a garage sale.

When humor goes, there goes civilization

arms weren't flabby. He never used to yell at

I've always admired parents who discipline their children in hushed whispers: "Arthur, you are a naughty boy for turning on all the gas jets. Now I want you to drag your little sister out into the fresh air, give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and apologize. Don't make Mama have to raise her voice." I

I try, but somehow I am always the woman in the wrong line. Lines are like a foreign language. You have to know how to read and to translate them. What looks to me like a thirty-second transaction invariably ends up as a tenor thirty-minute wait.

Much of the loss of temper that we see in family life and in intimate friendships and courtships stems from simply hearing the wrong things at the wrong times.

the neurotic symptom is a communication about truth: that the illusion that one is invulnerable is a lie.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

Listen, I told him. Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet.

A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it.

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.

Good writing is good conversation, only more so.

I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try and make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful. Then you write for who you love whether they can read or write or not and whether they are alive or dead.

I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.

Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.

The bulls are my best friends. I translated to Brett. You kill your friends? she asked. Always, he said in English, and laughed. So they don't kill me.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?