Sometimes when you take strong stands, if you’re not called to do it, you’re dividing the audience you’re trying to reach.

The kids never listen to you, especially the youngest ones.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

I did my utmost to ensure that everyone below me in the chain of command felt comfortable approaching me with concerns, ideas, thoughts, and even disagreements.

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

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to trust your team. It’s a lesson I’ve had to relearn quite a few times.

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.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

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.

If you want to get each individual’s honest opinion, you don’t want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.

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

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.

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?

Silence is more eloquent than words.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.

Yes, I’m always – I’m always surprised when you make a film and you live with it a while and you put it out, you never dream that anybody is ever going to want to really see it.

I didn’t just invent saying offensive things.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly.

Taylor Swift’s audience can listen to me, but so can the street kids. I want to touch it all.

If you can’t hear me, it’s because I’m in parentheses.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

Comedy’s about opening up and being unique, but to a point where the audience can relate to what you’re saying.

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

I looked the people of Louisiana in the eye and told them exactly what I thought in terms that normal people use.

I want to be a man who is truthful and who won’t let pride get in the way of my ripping myself open to my partner and saying, ‚Here I am. This is me.‘ I feel there’s something powerful when a man reaches a point in his life when he can be completely vulnerable.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

The American public’s a lot more sophisticated than we all give them credit for. And on complicated issues, I’m going to give them straight answers. And if it takes more than three minutes, I’m going to do it.

The true triumph of reason is that it enables us to get along with those who do not possess it.

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.

Being flooded with information doesn’t mean we have the right information or that we’re in touch with the right people.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

A person hears only what they understand.

The American people are entitled to see the president and to hear his views directly, and not to see him only through the press.

Put it this way: If I asked, ‚How’s business?‘ and you say, ‚Boomin‘ or ‚Amazing,‘ I already know the answer.

‚Good English‘ is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.

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

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

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

If we accept being talked to any kind of a way, then we are telling ourselves we are not quite worth the best. And if we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less than courtesy, we tell ourselves and the world we are not very intelligent.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

I there represent that I sent notice of my method to Mr. Leibnitz before he sent notice of his method to me, and left him to make it appear that he had found his method before the date of my letter.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

Sincere words are not fine; fine words are not sincere.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

Both times I was in India, I could not get people to listen to each other. I had to literally tell people to listen to each other and tell them that they can’t get creative and find alternate solutions if they don’t listen to each other. There’s a lot of arguing and justifying.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

Most negotiators are trying to get their way.