The Americans, who are the most efficient people on earth,… have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on a conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Bore: one who has the power of speech but not the capacity for conversation.
—Benjamin Disraeli
Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience.
—Bill Watterson
Saying what we think gives us a wider conversational range than saying what we know.
—Cullen Hightower
Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.
—Deborah Tannen
The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
—Dorothy Nevill
Education begins a gentleman, conversation completes him.
—Dr. Thomas Fuller
Few are agreeable in conversation, because each thinks more of what he intends to say than of what others are saying, and listens no more when he himself has a chance to speak.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld
To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
—George Bernard Shaw
Anecdotes and maxims are rich treasures to the man of the world, for he knows how to introduce the former at fit place in conversation.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
One of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.
—Jonathan Swift
Conversation is food for the soul.
—Mexican Proverb
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
—Plato
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson