Strong minds talk about ideas; weak minds talk about people.
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard.
At the beginning of a marriage ask yourself whether this woman will be interesting to talk to from now until old age. Everything else in marriage is transitory: most of the time is spent in conversation.
There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.
Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.
A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.
In God's intention, a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage.
When interviews are good, the conversation can be amazing. Sometimes I've had conversations with journalists that I've never had with anybody else.
Whether one talks well depends very much upon whom he has to talk to.
I like when you can have a conversation with people and it's not just stock questions.
The quality of festival Q&As is often a matter of chance. Sometimes the lights come up on movies I loved, and not a single meaningful question is asked. Sometimes it's the opposite.
A great dinner must include not only yummy food, but good conversation.
In short, we lose the freshness and spontaneity of true conversation. These are areas in which everyone interested in self-improvement will seek to improve.
The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you're talking about what's in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself.
When it comes to my vocabulary, I felt a responsibility when I was teaching to raise the bar of conversation in my classroom. And with my own students, I refused to let them use the phrase "I like" or "I don't like" when we were engaged in a critique.
It would be a shame to go out with a hot girl you can't have a decent conversation with!
Your preschool child will chatter endlessly to you. If you half-listen and half-reply the whole conversation will seem, and become, tediously meaningless for both of you. but if you really listen and really answer, he will talk more and what he says will make more sense.
All the research shows that the presence of that phone will do two things to the conversation. It will make the conversation go to trivial matters, and it will decrease the amount of empathy that the two people in the conversation feel toward each other. That phone is a signal that either of us can put our attention elsewhere.
The podcasts that keep my attention are those where I can feel the hosts and guests are enjoying themselves or are really passionate about the subject matter.
I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it - yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
What bothers me is that there is so much emphasis on food, rather than gathering and meeting - so that there is all this effort in creating the right food, whereas the food is only a small part of whether the encounter is successful or not.
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
I flirted with Rihanna once. It didn't work - but it didn't not work. It didn't go anywhere, but it was a great conversation.
An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.
A man of sense and education should meet a suitable companion in a wife. It is a miserable thing when the conversation can only be such as whether the mutton should be boiled or roasted, and probably a dispute about that.
