Michael Stipe Quotes

My saving grace was that I always knew when to leave the party.

I think the sort of person you want at a party is someone who is self-aware, polite and has a basic knowledge of table manners. And that goes for both men and women.

The best time to leave a party is when the party’s just beginning. There’s no drink that kills except the drink that you didn’t want to take, as the saying goes, and there’s no hour that kills except the hour you stayed after you wanted to go home.

Good humour may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society.

Cocktail parties for me can be nerve-racking. The brevity of conversations, the number of them - it's not my sweet spot.

the person talking to you never looks directly at you, but rather around the room, searching for the answer to the universal cocktail party question, 'Who's here tonight?

I would rather be seated between any two women than any two men at a dinner party.

No man does right by a woman at a party.

If you decide on having an alcoholic at your party, make sure it's a large gathering. This way, until the alcoholic begins removing their clothes or dangling the cat out the window, they can sort of blend in. An alcoholic at a small gathering is called an intervention.

A party is a slightly artificial event where one learns the rudiments of human behavior at its most admirable: speaking when spoken to, looking somebody in the eye, shaking hands and being friendly under duress.

What's interesting is relative levels of introversion tend to stay the same. If you went back to your reunion from school, you would probably find that if you ranked everyone in your class into terms of levels of introversion and extroversion you'd still be the same rank.

It's always better to leave the party early.

There are different groups of people in your life that you behave slightly differently with. You behave one way with your family. You behave in a different way with your work colleagues. You behave differently with your friends from the movie club, your fitness instructor - all subtly different personas.

Cocktail parties ... are usually not parties at all but mass ceremonials designed to clear up at one great stroke a wealth of obligations.

The movements of the eyes express the perpetual and unconscious courtesy of the parties.

Fight fire with fire. If you must have bores, always put them together or at the same table ... bores have an effervescent chemical reaction on one another at a party. They invariably have a marvelous time trading banalities in the absence of competition. Clichés roll trippingly off the tongue like sparkling epigrams and trite observations acquire depth sinking into receptive minds.

Nature has left every man a capacity of being agreeable, though not of shining in company; and there are a hundred men sufficiently qualified for both who, by a very few faults, that they might correct in half an hour, are not so much as tolerable.

somehow at parties at which one stays standing up one seems to require to be more concentratedly intelligent than one does at those at which one can sit down.

I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Only a great fool or a great genius is likely to flout all social grace with impunity, and neither one, doing so, makes the most comfortable companion.

Talk often, but never long; in that case, if you do not please, at least you are sure not to tire your hearers. Pay your own reckoning, but do not treat the whole company; this being one of the few cases in which people do not care to be treated, every one being fully convinced that he has wherewithal to pay.

Few are qualified to shine in company, but it is in most men's power to be agreeable.

Every man depends on the quantity of sense, wit, or good manners he brings into society for the reception he meets with in it.

A man of sense soon discovers, because he carefully observes, where and how long he is welcome; and takes care to leave the company at least as soon as he is wished out of it. Fools never perceive whether they are ill timed or ill placed.