Jonathan Swift Quotes

My mother was a listener. I'm a talker. I'm very comfortable talking.

I can't decide which way I talk. I really, honestly can't.

Women are more complicated communicators than men, who have a tendency to pronounce and bloviate, and that makes for better writing in talky work.

To stutter through it with you or even stop stuttering and say nothing, was so lucky and soft, better talk than mile-a-minute with anyone. After a few minutes we’d stop rattling, we’d adjust, we’d settle in, and the conversation would speed into the night.

The basic rule of human nature is that powerful people speak slowly and subservient people quickly - because if they don't speak fast enough, nobody will listen to them.

Women speak at an earlier age, more easily, and more agreeably than men; they are accused also of speaking more; this is as it should be, and I willingly change the reproach into a eulogy.

We have three things in common: Irish wives, the ability to speak for 17 minutes without a verb, and the fact that we both speak with an accent.

The speed of her tongue is not correctly calculated; the speed per second of her toungue should be slightly less than the speed per second of her thoughts -at any rate not the reverse.

Women, tend to talk more than men, and they do this thing where they say things that can easily be shown. Like, they don't need to do that.

I like that feeling in your brain when you've got seven things that you're holding in one moment-you heard that person cough, you heard that person laugh, you're also saying your line, you're also listening to the person who's talking to you.

The microspeed of the tongue ought to be always slightly less than the microspeed of the thoughts and certainly not ever the reverse.

[J.F] Kennedy's own accent was inconsistent. So people are inconsistent. And it always kind of irks me when people talk about inconsistent accents, because people are imperfect by nature. So in the end, what you do is, you do an inhabitation and not an imitation.

The British vice is overthinking before we speak, which is really annoying. I love the way that, in America, people are more straightforward.

It has been well observed that the tongue discovers the state of the mind no less than that of the body; but in either case, before the philosopher or the physician can judge, the patient must open his mouth.

I say a lot of things - millions of words a day - so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement.

People love talking, and I have never been a huge talker. I carry on an inner monologue, but the words often don't reach my lips.

Reflective thinking is like the crock pot of the mind. It encourages your thoughts to simmer until they're done.

Out of respect, a man must veil his words when talking with a woman, but with a man he can frankly say whatever's on his mind.

The talkers are rising above the thinkers.

You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking.

You only had to choose which me to talk to, for, you know, we all change our manners, depending on who has come to chat. One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.

So perhaps the correct conclusion is that Green was less attuned to how people sound when they speak - the actual words and expressions they employ - than to what they mean. This notion of dialogue as a pure expression of character that...transcends the specifics of time and place may be partly why the conversations in the works of writers such as Austen and Bronte often sound fresh and astonishingly contemporary.

[On George H.W. Bush:] A man who wishes to lead the Western world should be able to find the right words, string them together in coherent sentences, and steer them to an intelligible conclusion. His sentences have the stuttering start of an old car on a cold morning. They never run smoothly. The only speech part that he has mastered completely is the non sequitur.

When one is polite in German, one lies.

I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.