I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

All good art is an indiscretion.

People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

Beauty without expression is boring.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone’s eyes.

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

I’m not in the business of ranking or debating who is what.

I’ve been a lot more into Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, which was a bit complicated for me to understand the language of each social media, because they all talk in different ways. It’s a nice way for me to tell people I appreciate them, which I forget to do sometimes.

I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another.

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

The best morale exist when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it’s usually lousy.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs the risk of not being understood.

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

Not only do I think being nice and kind is easy but being kind, in my opinion, is important.

Being a good listener is absolutely critical to being a good leader; you have to listen to the people who are on the front line.

I exaggerate when I’m angry, but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.

I’m not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We’re not ‚celebrities‘, whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They’re what people meet.

I am a good listener. I think that came from my schooling.

I didn’t just invent saying offensive things.

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.

I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse. So for me, it’s a great thing to be able to scream and say whatever I want.

Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little – somebody who is obsessed by Making.

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don’t go away, they just echo around.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

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

Be generous with kindly words, especially about those who are absent.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

It’s a rather rude gesture, but at least it’s clear what you mean.

Disagreement is something normal.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say.

I don’t mind how much my Ministers talk, so long as they do what I say.

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

I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.

There is but one way for a president to deal with Congress, and that is continuously, incessantly, and without interruption. If it is really going to work, the relationship has got to be almost incestuous.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

I have never thought it necessary to patronize the American people.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

You don’t tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever.

I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time – for 40 years – and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.