Rowan Williams Quotes

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.

As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?

I think that people in Mexico talk too much.

I'm more into human nature than politics. But they're intertwined. Obviously, I live in civilization, so politics are part of my life.

Politics is a matter of human transaction. I consider absolutely everything political, because all fiction involves relationships between people, and relationships between people always include matters of power, of equity, of communication.

Our human experience, like the World War II Ultra code-breaking machine, catches the heavy traffic of messages about what we really do and what is done to us every day.

It's inevitable your environment will influence what you do.

I'm also fascinated by the interplay between personal history and the larger forces that form the context for our lives.

Most social acts have to be understood in their setting and lose meaning if isolated... No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.

In 1600, when Shakespeare's audience at the Globe heard 'Hamlet' for the first time, every one of them knew very well what it meant to be handed a cup of wine by a figure of authority and told to drink.

America is a noisy culture, unlike, say, Finland, which values silence. Individualism, dominant in the U.S. and Germany, promotes the direct, fast-paced style of communication associated with extraversion. Collectivistic societies, such as those in East Asia, value privacy and restraint, qualities more characteristic of introverts.

How we behave in our public lives inevitably reflects values, attitudes and experiences embedded in our private lives and vice versa.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

Growing up in inner-city neighborhoods, there's a particular structure, which I'm sure is true of most social contexts. The type of person you are determines the role you play.

All animals communicate. What's special about gossip is that it's not about the here and now. You don't gossip about lions. You don't gossip about clouds. You only gossip about other people. And once you do, you can keep track of many more people - this is the basis for forming larger communities.

There is a close meshing with the ritual properties of persons and with the egocentric forms of territoriality.

In China, people only talk to make a point. You ask someone to go to lunch. They say yes or they say no.

One should go to the line through the character. You should see their lifestyle in the way they speak.

Conversation's got to have some root in the past, or else you've got to explain every remark you make, an' it wears a person out.

Thoughts exchanged by one and another are not the same in one room as in another.

There are going to be people doing the talking and people who get talked about, choose, which one do you want to be?

The nature of bad news affects the teller.

If I'm at somebody's house and they have magazines on the table and people are chatting, I feel almost a physical urge to start reading the magazines instead of talking to people.

If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.