Quotes About Conversation

During the Me Too breakthrough, I was hanging out with Emma Thompson and Emily Watson - two people I've looked up to my entire life. Talking to those women was so empowering.

'Pretty Lady' is the conversation piece where you just need to compliment your lady. If you are in a club setting, and you just been eyeing a beautiful woman, this song came from me trying to compliment women and them turning their face up at me.

The most attention I get is in a book store or video shop when I go to the foreign film section. Sometimes that can be fun, but usually those women want to talk about philosophy or something very dense. It's not like they're tearing off my shirt, you know.

Why don't men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation', garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book.

One of the first studies in the field of gender and language, by Don H. Zimmerman and Candace West in 1975, found that in casual conversations between women and men, women were interrupted far more often.

While white women and men of color also experience discrimination, all too often their experiences are taken as the only point of departure for all conversations about discrimination. Being front and center in conversations about racism or sexism is a complicated privilege that is often hard to see.

My interest in the linguistic differences between women and men grew from research I conducted early in my career on conversations between speakers of different ethnic and regional backgrounds.

It might seem at first surprising that when I studied women and men talking at work, I found that women 'interrupted' each other more often than men did - when they were in all-women conversations.

It should be common knowledge that women and men can talk about sports.

Having a female point of view in the room - when you get into a discussion about behavior - who would say what and how they would interact with one another. In certain situations, women are going to have a different opinion on that than men. It made for a really balanced conversation in the room.

I think it's lovely that women are afforded attention on the stage in terms of their inner journeys, their emotional lives. That's the great harvest, the great writing available to women. Whether that makes it to the screen, that's a whole other conversation.

Too many politicians are shifting the critical themes of our national conversations from a 'big ideas' American Brand Platform to narrowly focused, polarizing sound bites that put party philosophy before what used to be heralded as the common good. These ideas, more often than not, divide us rather than serve to bind us.

I don't have a real plan when I do an interview. I have some themes that I want to hit. But I don't have a set list of questions that I knock off.

Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

I strongly believe film should create conversations around themes we are grappling with as a society.

I'm not a fan of small talk but if you want to get into the big questions of life - your deepest regret, your greatest joy - then we're going to have a great chat.

We do not talk - we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

I have a theory that I'm always hungry when I do interviews, as I always talk about food.

I think talking things out is therapeutic.

Individual psychotherapy - that is, engaging a distressed fellow human in a disciplined conversation and human relationship - requires that the therapist have the proper temperament and philosophy of life for such work. By that I mean that the therapist must be patient, modest, and a perceptive listener, rather than a talker and advice-giver.

I treat my cat like she's my therapist or something, because I talk to her all the time, and as she's gotten older, she talks back. It's pretty funny.

In New York and L.A., there is sort of that silent competition to be on the cutting edge of something. You end up having a conversation with how the world receives your work, especially if you are writing narrative, not fiction. Sometimes it is an awkward conversation. It's like group therapy.

If you get divorced in New York, you go into therapy and will talk to anybody you meet on the sidewalk about it.

For me, doing an interview with someone is like having therapy.