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

Smiles are the language of love.

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

Without tact you can learn nothing.

It’s never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn’t know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

I make a lot of expressions constantly. I’m animated.

Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

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

Words are loaded pistols.

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

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

Factoring in millions of people when I’m writing a song is not a good idea. I don’t ever do it.

To find out your real opinion of someone, judge the impression you have when you first see a letter from them.

Every day I try to be in communication with the universe in an unconscious way.

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

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

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

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.

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

Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

Parents and teachers, learn to listen, then listen to learn from children.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

The greatest service that can be offered to children who show personality traits or inclinations that might not be understood by the adults around them is to allow them to express their own unique humanity.

‚No comment‘ is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.

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.

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

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.

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.

Always be sincere, even if you don’t mean it.

If your man is a sports enthusiast, you may have to resign yourself to his spouting off in a monotone on a prize fight, football game or pennant race.

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

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

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person. That’s the only way I can find an explanation for why 55,000 people would want to come see me sing.

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

I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

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

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

You might be the funniest guy in the world, but if you don’t have anything to talk about, people are eventually going to gravitate towards the guy that’s actually saying something.

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.

After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one’s person.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

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

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

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

My name can’t be that tough to pronounce!

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.

The truth of it is that every singer out there with songs on the radio is raising the next generation, so make your words count.

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.