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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The two most precious things this side of the grave are our reputation and our life. But it is to be lamented that the most contemptible whisper may deprive us of the one, and the weakest weapon of the other.

People search for certainty. But there is no certainty.

I'm having fun just being a musician as well as an artist at this point.

All promise outruns performance.

My head looks like an uncooked ham with glasses.

I was incredibly lucky that my first book found a large and loyal readership. It changed my life - from being a very withdrawn adult to living in Paris as a full-time writer. It has also given me enormous confidence.

Hackers are breaking the systems for profit. Before it was about intellectual curiosity and pursuit of knowledge and thrill and now hacking is big business.

I read a lot of fiction.

The Midwest isn't somewhere you mix with those from the performing arts. But my mum and dad would go off to Chicago every so often to see shows. They would bring back the albums and the movies, those little eight metres, and we would all watch. I think that was when I fell in love with acting.

Whoever stands by a just cause cannot possibly be called a terrorist.

One of the scary things is that, when you're a kid, you look at your dad as the man who has no fear. When you're an adult, you realize your father had fear, and that you have it, too.

The best feeling I ever get is when I finish a song, and it exists, and it didn't exist before, and now it's there, and it makes me feel a certain way.

The thing about radio is that it's got an intimate feel. What I like is that you don't have to give it your full attention - you can still do something else that the same time, whereas TV is all-enveloping: you have to sit there and pay attention to it, and give yourself over to it. You have to surrender to it, but you don't with radio.

People do not understand what a great revenue economy is.

I believe that people are too complacent about technology.

I'm really not good at dressing up and being glamorous.

But it has also enabled me to find my feet as a lecturer and a reader of my own plays to audiences who like to hear them; and that experience of immediate appreciation gives greater pleasure and more stimulus towards further activity than even the most laudatory of reviews.

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.

We need more leaders speaking up for minority groups who have been marginalized and attacked.

This occasional sports columnist, who has been to his share of Super Bowls, had been glad to be home on Super Bowl Sunday, but the scary commercials made me want to be in the melee of the arena, where you are not aware of commercials.

Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.

I remember at the age of, and I'll say this, 10 and a half, 11, I had a natural boy soprano.

I believe that if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves. I have to root for a detective who screws up as much as Thorne does, who shares my birthday, my North London stomping ground, and my love of country music, both alt and cheesy.