Deborah Tannen Quotes

The difference between men and women seems to be this: I can argue with my promoter downstairs, accuse him of ripping me off, and 20 minutes later we'll be playing golf together. With a lady, the same argument can go on for, like, years.

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.

What women need to understand is that men don't communicate. It's not intentional or on purpose. We're just not as emotional. You ladies feel like you have to express yourselves.

Women eat while they are talking; men talk while they are eating.

What do women do when they get together? We sit around and talk! Men, not so much. My theory is that this difference is genetic and dates back to the hunter-gatherer societies, when the men had to be quiet as they hunted, lest they scare away the bison and then everyone starved to death and it was all their fault.

Men tend to be hierarchical, but women are driven to make lateral connections so they can cooperate.

Obviously I've spent most of my working life with men and they have this way of operating which seems a bit alien to me.

I don't think men talk as much as women, but when we have something on our minds we'll get it out.

Women like silent men. They think they're listening.

Women speak because they wish to speak, whereas a man speaks only when driven to speak by something outside himself like, for instance, he can't find any clean socks.

Guys don't really don't wanna hear if it's really smart, and women feel uncomfortable if you reveal stuff they're going to have to remember they did themselves.

Studies have been done showing that there really are gender differences, that women do bring more congeniality and compromise to the table.

The gentle and insinuating manners of the female sex tend to soften the roughness of the other sex.

… women are more quiet. They don't feel called to mount a barrel and harangue by the hour every time they imagine they have produced an idea.

Men are easier to get on with than women. They tend not to make emotional demands on you.

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.

In the U.S., women smile more than men. In the U.K., there's no difference between men and women.

Most of the time when you're around the opposite sex, you kinda have to put on a show and not completely be yourself.

Women hate a debt as men a gift.

Men have to be hooked. Women don't need that. Women go freely into anything. That's their power and at the same time their drawback. Men have to be led and women have to be contained

In society it is etiquette for ladies to have the best chairs and get handed things. In the home the reverse is the case. This is why ladies are more sociable than gentlemen.

I don't think men try to make women be like them, but I think women try to make men be like them, a lot.

Only a woman can make you feel wrong for doing something right.

Men, some to business, some to pleasure take; But every woman is at heart a rake.

Women tend to immediately take responsibility if somebody messes up with both of us saying it's our fault. Men are quite happy for it to be your fault it seems like.