Alex Garland Quotes

The second we see somebody on the street or meet someone, we make snap judgments about them, about who they are and why we wouldn't necessarily sit with them or why we would or what's cool or not cool.

Some guys say beauty is only skin deep. But when you walk into a party, you don't see somebody's brain. The initial contact has to be the sniffing.

Whether you want to admit it or not, people begin to judge you the minute you walk in the door.

You judge people as you meet them.

People judge you really quickly, at first just on your facial features. There are two dimensions - warmth and competence. You can think of them as trustworthiness and strength. They're first judging you on warmth; evaluating whether or not you are trustworthy. That's much more important to them than whether or not you're competent.

Air and manners are more expressive than words.

A bland smile is like a green light at an intersection, it feels good when you get one, but you forget it the moment you're past it.

Never ask a woman if you may kiss her. Instead, learn to read body language.

Whether it's because of how somebody looks or because of what they're wearing, you kind of assess a person in the first five minutes before they even speak.

Having a human conversation is not something I've had any training in either as a comedian or as, you know, a human being.

I think there's a worry that an excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that as a society we're losing some of the ability to build interpersonal communication that's necessary for living together and building a community.

I always start out saying exactly what everybody looks like. I don't know why.

My friends will be like, 'That bloke was chatting you up', and I'll go, 'What?' I'm so oblivious - I don't notice things like that.

First impressions matter. Experts say we size up new people in somewhere between 30 seconds and two minutes.

I like the idea that people have formed their own opinions. And of course once people meet me or talk to me their opinion totally changes because I'm much more that girl that you hang out with than you think.

What do you think is the world's most recognisable container of information? It's the human face. We are constantly reading each other and responding.

When two people are paying close attention to each other, check out the others in the group and see who's observing. Human dynamics are amazing, but so much that you might learn is subconscious interplay.

It is difficult to imagine how any behavior in the presence of another person can avoid being a communication of one's own view of the nature of one's relationship with that person and how it can fail to influence that person.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

The two things that hit you when you meet someone are, first, how they're visually put together and then, what they tell you with the tone of their voice - whether or not they're to be taken seriously.

When people walk in a room, the way they sit or they talk, that itself tells me a story.

Make it your profitable habit to carefully study facial expressions. You can see the entire human drama in a face; you can tell its owner's history.

You can tell a lot about a woman by her email signature. Actually you can't but for some reason people do anyway.

You judge someone from the day you meet them.

One of the things that women really excel at is reading and reacting to subtle cues. We've always had to do that because men don't have to.