Emily Maitlis Quotes

I don't know how to work a room. It's a real skill.

I do a lot of schmoozing.

People may have found it difficult to approach me, and I realised it and have worked on it. I used to be socially shy. Now I have become a social animal. I go out, meet and interact with people.

I'm dreadful at schmoozing at Hollywood parties.

I've never been socially outgoing, but I suspect I've gotten more and more ambivalent about making new friends. I'm irritated by how-do-you-do chit-chat, but that's how new relationships usually begin.

I just like to talk to people. I don't know how to bridge the gap between getting to know someone and then schmoozing and sort of working contacts and business connections.

That's all small talk is - a quick way to connect on a human level - which is why it is by no means as irrelevant as the people who are bad at it insist. In short, it's worth making the effort.

I'm not an ace at small talk.

Cocktail parties for me can be nerve-racking. The brevity of conversations, the number of them - it's not my sweet spot.

As an adult I've developed better social skills; I know how to do a conversation, I know how to do a party. I find them wearying, though, and I like that in lockdown no one expects me to go to them.

People feel I don't mix much, but I'm working at it.

I was never one to go up to someone as a five- or six-year-old and say, 'Hello, my name's Paul, will you be my friend?' But I found if I did an impression of the PE teacher or whatever and people laughed, then they did like me, and so then they started talking to me, rather than me making the initial overture and then maybe being rebuffed.

My father found cocktail parties challenging.

At school, when it came to being social, I had no idea how to do it.

I'm not a good small talker. I'm not into small talk, frankly.

Whenever you're starting a new show, you have these awkward first lunches and meetings that are sort of mandatory, and everybody shows up, but nobody knows each other.

I often joke that I've just become a professional schmoozer. Like, nobody cares how well I can rock climb anymore. It just has to do with how well I can schmooze.

I get a lot of letters from introverts asking how they can meet people. The key is to make sure that you are doing things you enjoy.

The brain was not built to walk into a bar, where you know nobody, and start a conversation. That's not the way humanity has courted.

I'm not exactly a guy who makes new friends easily.

We have lost the art of conversation. People are shy and don't know how to approach other people, and they are missing opportunities for relationships. And no one's entertaining at home anymore. They're not having people over for dinner.

You know, if you meet someone for the first time, they're not going to bite you.

As I started getting better and I had to go places and meet new people, there were times where you just couldn't keep to yourself. You had to speak to people.

I can get awkward. I am not the best person to break the ice.

Talk often, but never long; in that case, if you do not please, at least you are sure not to tire your hearers. Pay your own reckoning, but do not treat the whole company; this being one of the few cases in which people do not care to be treated, every one being fully convinced that he has wherewithal to pay.