Source: How to Become President (1940), Ch. 1 : Government jobs pay big money
Context: Who am I to talk? That’s a fair question, and one which deserves a better answer than I can give you. … Come to think of it, who are you? Whoever you are, I sympathize with you. I sympathize with everybody; that’s what I get for being a candidate myself. Let them call us nonentities. Who cares? A nonenitiy can be just as famous as anybody else if enough people know about him.
But let’s leave personalities out of this and just talk about me.
“You are better at small talk than I am. That is not always a compliment.”
Source: Lock In (2014), Chapter 22 (p. 296)
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John Scalzi 68
American science fiction writer 1969Related quotes

Letter to Gertrude Natkin, 2 March 1906 http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/53b4cf90-7739-0132-f12c-58d385a7b928

“Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It's how true friends talk.”
Peggy Noonan, in What I Saw at the Revolution : A Political Life in the Reagan Era (1990), p. 321

Quote in his letter to John Dunthorne (14 February 1814), as quoted in Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1993), p. 151
1800s - 1810s

“Life is tough when you are always talking to people smarter than you.”
Source: The 3 Mistakes of My Life (2008), P. 5