A Quote by Cornelia Otis Skinner

That amenity which the French have developed into a great art . . . conversation. — © Cornelia Otis Skinner
That amenity which the French have developed into a great art . . . conversation.
Art history is fine. I mean, that's a discipline. Art history is art history, and you start from the beginning and you end up in artist in time. But art is a little bit different. Art is a conversation. And if there's no conversation, what the hell is it about?
The definitions of humanism are many, but let us here take it to be the attitude of those men who think it an advantage to live in society, and, at that, in a complex and highly developed society, and who believe that man fulfills his nature and reaches his proper stature in this circumstance. The personal virtues which humanism cherishes are intelligence, amenity, and tolerance; the particular courage it asks for is that which is exercised in the support of these virtues. The qualities of intelligence which it chiefly prizes are modulation and flexibility.
I happen to disagree with the well-entrenched theory that the art of conversation is merely the art of being a good listener. Such advice invites people to be cynical with one another and full of fake; when a conversation becomes a monologue, poked along with tiny cattle-prod questions, it isn't a conversation any more.
One can say that the disaffection is still a lingering naiveté about, not the place of poetry in the world, but - how to say this - the moral and intellectual presence of poets in the world. And while this may seem an old conversation to many poets who roll their eyes and say, "Here we go again about the function of poetry," I think that conversation, about poetry as an engaged art in a world that is full of regression or still lacking in progress, is still really not well-developed. It's almost an avoided conversation.
Conversation as talent exists only in France. In other countries, conversation provides politeness, discussion, and friendship; in France, it is an art for which imagination and soul are certainly very welcome, but which can also provide its own secret remedies to compensate you for the absence of either or both, if you so desire.
I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.
Informal conversation is probably the oldest mechanism by which opinions on products and brands are developed, expressed, and spread.
A big part of the challenge is teaching your kids how to have a real conversation, not a texting conversation. If they're not sitting down at the table, the art of conversation is going to go.
I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.
Silence is one great art of conversation.
Snob value has great appeal. I have a couple of properties on the French Riviera that have doubled in value - I may buy more as the region continues to be developed.
Wherever you've got a migrant culture, the food evolves and in New Orleans it's that French and Spanish influence. So you get gumbo, which came out of French bouillabaisse, jambalaya - a version of paella - and the boudin sausage, which is like the French boudin.
The men who were running the church in the late '60s and '70s panicked when they saw the chaos, which developed after the council. The relatively modest changes of those years thawed the ice in which Catholicism had been frozen since the French Revolution.
Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue; and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves.
I myself owe everything to French books. They developed in my soul the sentiments of humanity which had been stifled by eight years of fanatical and servile education.
I am not a great French woman. George Sand, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir are great French women.
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