Russell Hoban Quotes

Language cares.

I have no message.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Words are only as good as the response to those words.

The purpose of language is to communicate. That's the most basic definition of language. I have my own subjective experience going on in my head, and you have your own subjective experience going on in your head. The only way we can bridge that unbridgeable gap is through language.

Emails get reactions. Phone calls start conversations.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.

Music is a dialogue.

If you have something to say then you want someone to pay attention or at least to have the opportunity for them to tell you to shut up and go away.

I see people in terms of dialogue and I believe that people are their talk.

I have always been attracted to apostrophe, perhaps because of its resemblance to prayer. A voice reaches out to something beyond itself that cannot answer it. I find that moving in part because it enacts what is true of all address and communication on some level - it cannot fully be heard, understood, or answered.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Speech is the small change of silence.

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

I think jamming is the way we begin to communicate. In the old days, people actually wrote notes on paper and sent them to each other. I guess that's how they jammed.

Communication is important.

It's not that I don't like words. There's sometimes no need for words.

Acting is doing, because everything you say or do is some kind of an action, some kind of a verb. You're always connected to the other person through some kind of action.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Everyone wants to talk, you've just got to find a way to get them to talk.

Communication is at the very core of our society. That's what makes us human.

Readers are what it's all about, aren't they? If not, why am I writing?

How or by what magic is it, that we convey our thoughts to one another with such case and accuracy?

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.