Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words.

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

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

I meet people overseas that know five languages – that the only language I’m comfortable in is English.

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

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.

I wanted to write.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

Diplomacy is the art of saying ‚Nice doggie‘ until you can find a rock.

I want to negotiate what I’m worth. I want to put my analytics forward, man-to-man, and to be like, ‚This is what I’m owed now. Pay me.‘ And then we can talk.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

I’m a people pleaser. 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.

It may happen sometimes that a long debate becomes the cause of a longer friendship. Commonly, those who dispute with one another at last agree.

So many writers don’t like to write… I like to write, and sometimes I’m afraid I like it too much, because when I get into work, I don’t want to leave it. And as a result, I’ll go for days and days and days without leaving my house.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

Be not a slave of words.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.

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.

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

There are some people, you know, they think the way to be a big man is to shout and stomp and raise hell-and then nothing ever really happens. I’m not like that I never shoot blanks.

I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.

I think some of my colleagues‘ spicier lines are distracting. They draw attention away from what the justice is trying to say.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

I’ve had moments when I’ve thought about somebody, picked up the phone to call them and they are on the line already, and I think that maybe there’s some vibration, some connection.

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you’re advancing. If you don’t you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

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.

There was one incident at a movie theater where my girl got mad at these guys who were talking behind us. I never looked back there, but she was like, ‚Will you all just shut up!‘ And I just got up and moved three rows in front. She was like, ‚What are you doing?!‘ I was like, ‚You better get up here! I don’t play the fighting games.‘

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn’t bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.

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

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.

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

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.

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

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

The problem with having a sense of humor is often that people you use it on aren’t in a very good mood.

I’m the most recognized and loved man that ever lived cuz there weren’t no satellites when Jesus and Moses were around, so people far away in the villages didn’t know about them.

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

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

We can’t just choose to tell some facts and not others because we don’t want to upset people. We have to tell it like it is.