Captivating Delivery Quotes

A good speech should be like a woman's skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world.

It's the subtleties of a ballad that truly make it beautiful - and it's all in the way you present it to the listener.

To be effective the preacher's message must be alive; it must alarm, arouse, challenge; it must be God's present voice to a particular people.

Iggy Pop has a voice that's somehow simultaneously self-mocking, wild, precise, amused, righteous, cool, contained and bold. I don't know how he does what he does.

Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes.

My gift seems to be that I am able to tell a story in a comprehensible and engaging way.

The greatest compliment that anyone can pay me is that after I say something, they remember it. I'll go over a piece of copy until I've gotten the essence of what the writer had in mind - every nuance.

Great lecturers seldom hesitate to use dramatic tricks to enshrine their precepts in the minds of their audiences, and at Yale perhaps Chauncey B. Tinker was the most noted. To read one of his lectures was like reading a monologue of the great actress Ruth Draper--you missed the main point. You missed the drop in his voice as he approached the death in Rome of the tubercular Keats; you missed the shaking tone in which he described the poet's agony for the absent Fanny with him his love had never been consummated; you missed the grim silence of the end.

Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colorless photography of a printed record.

If a voice is just too nice, without an edge, it kinda all flows by. You forget it. You don't listen to the lyrics.

No man was ever eloquent by trying to be eloquent, but only by being so.

A speech is entertaining only when serenely detached from all information.

The entertainment is in the presentation.

The audience will always forgive you for being wrong and exciting, but never for being right and dull.

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, To stir men's blood: I only speak right on; I tell you that which you yourselves do know.

Instead of announcing what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.

All preaching should be as creative as we can make it. We've been entrusted with such a treasure. To have anywhere from 50 to 5000 people who give us 30 minutes of their time to hear whatever we want to say - I think they deserve all the creativity that we can give.

We oftener say things because we can say them well, than because they are sound and reasonable.

Shatner will spin lines in ways you don't see coming - he winds the audience down like a spring and hits the line so hard, they erupt. It's amazing to watch actually.

I would not have preachers torment their hearers, and detain them with long and tedious preaching.