Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

Me is a common sense man. That mean when me explain things, me explain it in a very simple way; that mean if I explain it to a baby, the baby will understand too, you know.

I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.

I just think you ought to talk straight with your people.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

It could be if I fight in front of one person or one million people. It’s still the same emotions.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false ‚intelligence‘ and selected ‚leaks.‘

I’ve always regretted that I never was able to talk openly with my parents, especially with my father. I’ve heard and read so many things about my family that I can no longer believe anything; every relative I question has a completely different story from the last.

I want to let you in on a little secret: I don’t always feel like I’m a success. That’s right. There are plenty of times when I feel like I’ve just totally messed up and failed to connect with the people I’m trying to communicate with.

We must distinguish between speaking to deceive and being silent to be reserved.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

The only thing I know is I ain’t changing my brand. I know what I believe. I’m confident in what I know. And I’m gonna say it. And if folks like it, wonderful. If they don’t like it, I understand.

I just have a thing in my brain that when I’m about to do something that’s genuine or authentic, I think of it in song form. I’ll be like, ‚Yo, this is a human emotion that no one talks about.‘

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

When I talked to him on the phone yesterday. I called him George rather than Mr. Vice President. But, in public, it’s Mr. Vice President, because that is who he is.

If you gonna wear the mohawk, you stick with it. You don’t just be dibby-dabbing. You make up your mind.

One of the amazing things about ‚Seven Samurai‘ is that there are a lot of characters. And considering you have so many, and they all have shaved heads, and you’ve got good guys and bad guys and peasants, you get to understand a lot of them without too much being said.

If you’re living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

One thing that I tell people all the time is, ‚I’m not going to answer a call from you after nine o’clock at night or before nine o’clock in the morning unless it’s an emergency.‘

If you’re a politician, you might want to learn the Buddhist way of negotiation. Restoring communication and bringing back reconciliation is clear and concrete in Buddhism.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

To the audience, it’s like I’m changing the subject every five seconds, but to me, my show’s almost like a 90-minute song that I know exactly. I wrote every note, and I know exactly where everything is.

I have always been that girl in the back who doesn’t say anything.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

I’d always tried to resist playing the supervirility thing. I liked showing the vulnerability of age.

It used to be the case, like you’d switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn’t keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

Vulnerability is about showing up and being seen. It’s tough to do that when we’re terrified about what people might see or think.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

Image, lyrics, content, storytelling, cohesive body of work – that’s Prince to me.

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth – anonymously and posthumously.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Talking isn’t doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

To a guy like me, a laugh is full of information.

There is one way to have a short but exciting conversation with me, and that is to move too slow.

This thing that I do with caring about the message in my music, it’s not separate from my work as a commercial artist; they’re totally one and the same. I’m always going to be thinking about what my voice means.

Where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is?

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

I don’t write material. Funny things happen to me in the course of a day, and I just make notes.

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

Diplomacy is listening to what the other guy needs. Preserving your own position, but listening to the other guy. You have to develop relationships with other people so when the tough times come, you can work together.

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

I kind of make a film for myself to sort of express myself.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people’s faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I love tattoos. And mine symbolise who I really am. I have a Samurai on my left arm. At a subconscious level, I connect to this warrior and model myself on his discipline, skills and honour. There is also a tribal tattoo and a Chinese symbol of faith. I have seen a lot of people getting tattoos just because it’s a trend.

To me, it’s OK to have differences. But we don’t have to be mad about it. You know? And I think that’s where sometimes we get so passionate that we – you know, it turns into anger.

Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.