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

On TV the people can see it. On radio you’ve got to create it.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

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.

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

My mother always taught us that if people don’t agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.

If you’ve heard this story before, don’t stop me, because I’d like to hear it again.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

You can stroke people with words.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did. So after that, I switched to Communications.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

A yawn is a silent shout.

People don’t realise how difficult it is to work with people day in and day out that know absolutely nothing.

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.

In the end, people are persuaded not by what we say, but by what they understand.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

The more you know the less you need to say.

A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it’s employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

Disagreement is something normal.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.

Money has a language of its own.

You always have to remember that if you say something negative, it’s going to come back to haunt you.

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.

One might say that our words are a movie screen that reveals what we have been thinking and the attitudes we have.

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

How to drive a guy crazy: send him a telegram and on the top put ‚page 2.‘

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

People like to talk about war.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

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.

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.

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

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.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

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.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

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

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.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

We shall never be able to remove suspicion and fear as potential causes of war until communication is permitted to flow, free and open, across international boundaries.

Life is an ordeal, albeit an exciting one, but I wouldn’t trade it for the good old days of poverty and obscurity.

If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

I’m not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I’m going to say how I feel.

Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.