Edward St Aubyn Quotes

My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.

I think it's good to meet smart people and talk.

Hollywood is a special place; a place filled with creative geniuses - actors, screenwriters, directors, sound engineers, computer graphics specialists, lighting experts and so on. Working together, great art happens. But in the end, all artists depend on diverse audiences who can enjoy, be inspired by and support their work.

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but, less by assimilation than by fiction.

I would venture to warn against too great intimacy with artists as it is very seductive and a little dangerous.

In this great age of communication, there a lot of people you can't actually understand. I know everyone tweets, and twits and texts and all that, but actually we've all got voices, and it is awfully nice to hear them and if you can understand what people are saying.

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

There's sort of a very symbiotic thing that happens on good TV shows with great writers, which is that they start to sort of embrace who the actors are and try to make the roles more specific to what they bring and what they can do.

Anybody who has something sensible or worthwhile to say should be able to say it calmly and soberly, relying on the words themselves to convey his meaning, without resorting to yelling.

There's not one major greatest influence on my career. It would be film and great artists and great imagineers - Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, people who understand the joy of the imagination.

I wanted to create this dialogue between music and visual art and vice versa. No matter what part of the spectrum they fill, whether it's visual, music, or whatever, artists are interested in other art forms. Your brain is already kind of firing in that way.

I enjoy people who talk intelligently.

The first thing you have to learn is how to conduct dialogue and how to make it productive.

When two friends are in the mood to chat, we have to go about it in a gentler and more dialectical way. By 'more dialectical,' I mean not only that we give real responses, but that we base our responses solely on what the interlocutor admits that he himself knows.

I like being around people who are good conversationalists, when there's a give and take, and you are heightening an idea, exploring it together, that is my favorite thing in the world.

A perfect conversation would run much less to brilliant sentences than to unfinished ones.

When interviews are good, the conversation can be amazing. Sometimes I've had conversations with journalists that I've never had with anybody else.

Reasonable men are the best dictionaries of conversation.

The great challenge facing us today is to learn once again how to talk to one another, not simply how to generate and consume information.

I like being around people who are good conversationalists. When there's a give and take, and you are heightening an idea, exploring it together, that is my favorite thing in the world. I love a small dinner party - let's say six people, max, where everybody's having the same conversation. That's my favorite thing in the world.

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

I need a challenge. I need the intellectual stimulation. I'm a member of a community on each film, working in concert to try to bring an idea to life. It's a great job.

I think parenting well is not so different than trying to consider how to be successful at any relationship. Like, how do you partner well? How do you collaborate well? How do we have this conversation well? You know, you're always trying to figure out what "well" means, so I think parenting is another version of that.

Human communication, 'as the saying goes, is a clash of symbols' it covers a multitude of signs. But it is more than media and messages, information and persuasion; it also meets a deeper need and serves a higher purpose. Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection.