Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing. If you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life.

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.

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

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Communication - the human connection - is the key to personal and career success.

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary, so that the necessary may speak.

Take advantage of every opportunity to practice your communication skills so that when important occasions arise, you will have the gift, the style, the sharpness, the clarity, and the emotions to affect other people.

Most people have to talk so they won’t hear.

Good words are worth much, and cost little.

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

Proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.

First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.

Effective communication is 20 percent what you know and 80 percent how you feel about what you know.

There is only one rule for being a good talker--learn to listen.

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.

To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well.

It’s much easier to be convincing if you care about your topic. Figure out what’s important to you about your message and speak from the heart.

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.

It's important to make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.

Most of the time, communication gets confused with conversation. In fact, the two are distinctly different.

Your words will either give you joy or give you sorrow, but if they were spoken without regret, they give you peace.

To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.

We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.

I went to Catholic school. Do as you're told; don't ask questions and you will be illuminated.

I was not developmentally disabled, but didn't mature at the same rate other kids did.

I learned my first lesson at the Walt Disney Company about not being able to trust my associates.

My writing voice is a little quirkier, more singer-songwriter-y than the Top 40 stuff I cover.

I don't want to look at myself - ever. All I see is that my face is a problem. It's asymmetrical. I get terrible bags under my eyes.

You must speak the vision of your project in a way that convinces people to pay for it. If they won't pay for it, that is the artist's fault. It is my fault. It is your fault. It is not the executive's fault or the world's.

I don't want to be known as a politician.

In Washington it is an honor to be disgraced. you have to have been somebody to fall.

If you attempt certain things at the right time, they are easy to accomplish - in fact, they almost get done by themselves. If you undertake them before the time is right, not only will they fail, but they will often become impossible to accomplish even when the time would have been right.

No one respects the First Amendment more than I do. People have a right to express their concerns and their hopes and dreams to their government.

It's great that with the Internet, there has come this sense of creative independence.

My friends, who sleep for all eternity; we do not forget you.

Where is the 'punch' in sweetness and light?

Selfish people are, by definition, those whose activities are devoted to bringing themselves happiness. Yet. . . these selfish people are far less likely to be happy than those whose efforts are devoted to making others happy.

People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.'

The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the marketplace.

A great nation is a compassionate nation.

The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory.

I'm not an angry man.

I wish my friends at William Morris Endeavor all the best.

But thankfully, my first album, 'Wide Screen,' was sort of a critics' darling - everyone raved about it, but no one bought it. They only manufactured 10,000 copies; I wasn't even in the running for failure!