“Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.”

“Two people sat talking in a small room for several weeks, and things started happening. They began thinking about each other; one would dream about the other; they copied each other's mannerisms. What was it really all about? She liked to think she had a firm hold on the reins at all times, but the truth was that often she was just along for the ride.”

Lisa Alther (1944) Novelist

“Why do people want to talk to each other? I mean, what are the things people always want to find out about other people?”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

“Lonely people, in talking to each other can make each other lonelier.”

Lillian Hellman The Autumn Garden

“When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

“Physicists can only talk to other physicists and economists to economists… sociologists often cannot even understand each other.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

“I'm mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can't even bring themselves to talk.”

Alice Walker book The Temple of My Familiar

“Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

“I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

“I've always believed that a lot of the trouble in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)