conversation

He was one of those men whose constitutional inability to make small talk forfeits all one's sympathy and makes one think that social grace is sometimes a moral duty.

He (Macaulay) has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation perfectly delightful.

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we have been ignorant of their value.

Conversation is the fine art of mutual consideration and communication about matters of common interest that basically have some human importance.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.

Speech is civilization itself.

The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing.

A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.

He had never imagined so clearly the consequences of mailing a letter__he impossibility of retrieving it from the iron mouth of the box; the inevitability if its steady progress through the postal system; the passing from bag to bag and postman to postman until a lone man in a van pulls up to the door and pushes a small pile through the letterbox. It seemed suddenly horrible that one's words could not be taken back, one's thoughts allowed none of the remediation of speaking face to face.

Surely only boring people went in for conversations consisting of questions and answers. The art of true conversation consisted in the play of minds.

Are you really going back there with me?" I ask."Hell yes I am. Your wish is finally coming true. I will see your vagina. Plus, I really want to see the look on that woman's face when she gets a peek at your plethora of pubes. Your copious curls, your abundant bush, the wild mane that if it sees a spark will start a forest fire," she states."Are you finished?" I ask irritably."I think so. But give me five minutes and I might be able to get one more in.

Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

Weird people don't care if they're weird. They are the most entertaining to converse with because nothing is off-limits.

A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.

But before she tells you anything." I glared at him suspiciously."your seed..."Tsaeb winced."What the hell are you talking about?""your...well, your seed. You know, you have to knock her up.

Every person has something meaningful to say in the conversation of life.

We don't talk, we hold forth. We don't converse, we expound.