Quotes About Communication

Poetry is not a silent art. The poem must perform, unaided, in its reader's head.

And he who is forever talking about enemies / Is himself the enemy!

Our swords shall play the orators for us.

to the tarahumara, asking direct questions is a show of force, a demand for a possession inside their head.

Talkers aren't listeners

Because we have to answer to one another, and they did not.

It is true that a writer writes first to please himself and that his own satisfaction with what he has done is perhaps his greatest satisfaction. But writing is a means of communication. It is not enough to speak; you must also be heard. The message must be received and understood.

That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.

There is only one rule for being a good talker - learn to listen.

A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.

The plural of spouse is spice.

It always seemed to me that [Henry James] had a kind of rush of words to the head and never stopped to sort them out properly.

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversations as a dog does

Talkers never write. They go on talking." There

nessuno come un cane sa apprezzare la straordinarietà della tua conversazione.

Are you signalling any one?" he asked. "No one in particular. I thought it looked better to have a few flags about." "I daresay you're right. But better take them down if you speak a ship. They're rather confusing." "Confusing? I thought they were just to brighten things up." "You have two different signals up. They read, Bubonic plague, give me a wide berth. Am coming to your assistance.

If we discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.

Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.

The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.

We think of communication as words. But a screaming child is trying to say something. A tantrum carries a message. Hitting is communication. Sleep patterns carry a message. Even the sulky belligerence of a teen is an attempt to convey a message. Everything the child does says something to the person who is willing to take the time to listen carefully.

Until we invent telepathy, books are our best choice for understanding the rest of humanity.

It's amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this books survives, his ideas live.