I’m terrified of losing my voice.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I’ll give you an example; I don’t read what’s handed to me. People say, ‚Here, here’s your speech, or here’s an idea for a speech.‘ They’re changed. Trust me.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

I feel like when I try to fit in, it comes across as not genuine, and that is not good. I’d rather just do me and have people say, ‚Oh. That’s interesting,‘ than try to fit in.

Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we’ve always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.

Never ask anyone over 70 how they feel. They’ll tell you.

We are looking for happiness and running after it in such a way that creates anger, fear and discrimination. So when you attend a retreat, you have a chance to look at the deep roots of this pollution of the collective energy that is unwholesome.

When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out.

I got a greater purpose. God put something in my heart to get across, and that’s what I’m going to focus on, using my voice as an instrument and doing what needs to be done.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

The worst part of success is, to me, adapting to it. It’s scary.

I try to speak in everyday language. I feel like God has gifted me to take Bible principles and make them practical.

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.

It is not these well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and the hungry-looking.

You know, I just do whatever feels right to me! And so that’s what you’re gonna get!

I am criticised for not celebrating my goals enough. I am very happy from within, very calm. I just don’t celebrate. I celebrate inside.

The ‚public‘ scares me, but people I trust.

I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

It is really very important while you are young to live in an environment in which there is no fear. Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living, afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or husband would say, afraid of death.

I don’t think people are going to talk in the future. They’re going to communicate through eye contact, body language, emojis, signs.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

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

When you have a conflict, that means that there are truths that have to be addressed on each side of the conflict. And when you have a conflict, then it’s an educational process to try to resolve the conflict. And to resolve that, you have to get people on both sides of the conflict involved so that they can dialogue.

Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

I write songs about stuff that I can’t really get past personally – and then I write a song about it and I feel better.

When you really don’t like a guy, they’re all over you, and as soon as you act like you like them, they’re no longer interested.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.

Hatreds not vowed and concealed are to be feared more than those openly declared.

My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean?

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

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.

I don’t think I’d ever apologise for music I make, no.

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

I’m going to get an MRI to find out whether I have claustrophobia.

The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?

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.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

The people to fear are not those who disagree with you, but those who disagree with you and are too cowardly to let you know.

I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we’d initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

Some animals utter a loud cry. Some are silent, and others have a voice, which in some cases may be expressed by a word; in others, it cannot. There are also noisy animals and silent animals, musical and unmusical kinds, but they are mostly noisy about the breeding season.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.