Quotes About Conversation

When they had finished they made me take notes of whatever conversation they had quoted, so that I might have the exact words, and got up to go, and when I asked them where they were going and what they were doing and by what names I should call them, they would tell me nothing, except that they had been commanded to travel over Ireland continually, and upon foot and at night, that they might live close to the stones and the trees and at the hours when the immortals are awake.

I can remember meeting of a Sunday night Charles Whibley, Kenneth Grahame, author of The Golden Age, Barry Pain, now a well-known novelist, R. A. M. Stevenson, art critic and a famous talker, George Wyndham, later on a cabinet minister and Irish chief secretary, and now or later Oscar Wilde, who was some ten years older than the rest of us.

Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.

I may want to sleep with Miss America, but I have no wish to hear her talk about herself and her family.

I am the Earl of Ravensmoor. And you are? (Sparhawk) Totally freaking out. (Taryn) Tis a most peculiar name, milady. Are you by chance Welsh? (Sparhawk)

I was Christmas shopping and ran into a guy on the street. I noticed his watch and said that it runs slow. He said, "So does the guy I stole it from."

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

You cannot not communicate. Every behavior is a kind of communication. Because behavior does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behavior), it is not possible not to communicate.

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well

Two monologues do not make a dialogue.

I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side.

More and more we are into communications; and less and less into communication.

Behind every communication problem is a sweaty ten-minute conversation that you don't want to have.

I am annoyed by individuals who are embarrassed by pauses in a conversation. To me, every conversational pause refreshes.

Male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication

Don't appear so scholarly, pray. Humanize your talk, and speak to be understood.

Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.

There cannot be greater rudeness than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse.

Successful communication depends on how well we listen, rather than how well we push our opinions on the person seated before us.

The more people are reached by mass communication, the less they communicate with each other.

People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.