Chris Abani Quotes

Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is.

Parla come magni,' It means, 'Speak the way you eat,' or in my personal translation: 'Say it like you eat it.' It's a reminder - when you're making a big deal out of explaining something, when you're searching for the right words - to keep your language as simple and direct as Roman rood. Don't make a big production out of it. Just lay it on the table.

What women need to understand is that men don't communicate. It's not intentional or on purpose. We're just not as emotional. You ladies feel like you have to express yourselves.

Do not put cleverness in front of the communication.

People think I'm really melancholy and romantic and all whispery. I'm not at all. I'm very direct.

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.

We're not big on irony in Jamaica, sarcasm and double-talk. We tend to say things plainly, sometimes to the point of boredom.

I'm a very direct person just generally. I don't use a lot of words unnecessarily. I try to get to the heart of the issue, address it and go on to the next thing.

Why don't men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation', garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book.

I have a direct way of speaking. What I do is tend to lay out everything; I tend to tell people what I'm going to do and how I'm going to do it and what is success for us and what's not... without being too parochial about it, I think Aussies are more direct.

It might seem at first surprising that when I studied women and men talking at work, I found that women 'interrupted' each other more often than men did - when they were in all-women conversations.

Women tell things in more interesting ways. They live with more feeling. They observe themselves and their lives. Men are more impressed with action. For them, the sequence of events is more important.

I have always been communicative. I can't help it if I have been misunderstood. Sometimes, people don't like straight answers.

Better to say something simply instead of giving people a bunch of vague metaphors to mull over.

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

Throw in the towel right off the bat. Women argue in ways that aren't rational to men.

I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.

I'm not the guy who will sit in a room with somebody who's using a bunch of big words and just act like I know what they're talking about, or sit on set with somebody and they'll be trying to explain something and not using layman's terms and I'll just say, "Hey, excuse me, what do you mean by that? Explain to me so I just understand."

Any man who thinks he knows the mind of a woman is a man who knows nothing.

Male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication

People think you're being dishonest because you're just too blunt.

The clear and simple words of common usage are always better than those of erudition. The jargon of the philosophers not seldom conceals an absence of thought.

A man speaks of what he knows, a woman of what pleases her: the one requires knowledge, the other taste.

Many men honestly do not know what women want, and women honestly do not know why men find what they want so hard to comprehend and deliver.