Veterans report that service dogs help break their isolation. People will often avert their eyes when they see a wounded veteran. But when the veteran has a dog, the same people will come up and say, 'Hi' to pet the dog and then strike up a conversation.
Unfortunately, with men's health, we don't talk about it enough, and prostate cancer gets lost in the conversation.
I had a great conversation with Tom Waits, of all people.
Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.
A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.
I wish my artwork could persuade millions of people to join a global conversation about sustainability.
Pretty much every weekend, my wife and I have the shall-we-live-in-the-country conversation. I suppose it's something to do with getting older and feeling I want to shed some of the things I've been doing for the last 20 years and go back to my roots.
Even though I'm from the Midwest, the majority of my life has been spent on the coasts where being gay wasn't really much of a conversation.
When you hear someone talking in a restaurant or overhear someone talking on the street, there are very different patterns of conversation than you would hear in a conventional movie.
There's not a lot of conversation going on in my world about softening my image. I'm pretty much who I am.
For girls and women, talk is the glue that holds a relationship together - and the explosive that can blow it apart. That's why you can think you're having a perfectly amiable chat, then suddenly find yourself wounded by the shrapnel from an exploded conversation.
We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.
This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.
I'm asking you to talk with your friends, neighbors, and relatives - even the ones you've never talked to about reproductive rights. That's how you can throw your number in the bucket, and stand with a president who has stood with us. Conversation by conversation, vote by vote, we will re-elect President Barack Obama!
The writing gets done away from the keyboard and away from the studio in my head, in solitude. And then I come in and hopefully have something, then I wrestle with sounds and picture all day long. But the ideas usually come from a more obscure place, like a conversation with a director, a still somebody shows you, or whatever.
With music, there's a conversation happening. You're hearing what's going on right now, with people's emotional states, in a communal way, and listening to that is really - it's both informative and so generous. It's like emotional news.
Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.
When I met Elvis, we didn't really have a conversation. I was introduced by my uncle, and he sort of grunted my way. What stays with me is the whole scene. I had never seen a real mob scene before. I was really young and impressionable. Elvis really did look - he looked sort of not real, as if he were glowing.
I didn't dictate sections of 'Visions of Cody'. I typed up a segment of taped conversation with Neal Cassady, or Cody, talking about his early adventures in L.A. It's four chapters.
The way our government handled the Chibok girls case goes beyond an election matter. This is not a one-time issue we discuss over elections. We need to have a deeper conversation about what kind of a nation we want to be.
Robert De Niro taught me how to listen, and how to be part of the conversation. It's not just about reading your lines and saying what's in the script; you have to understand your character, along with the other characters so that you can always respond.
Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.
I love conversation and the sharing of different thoughts and philosophies. That kind of stuff always makes me happy. I don't mind interviews, either - I like doing them.
Honestly, I am hoping to influence young people, and Twitter's a great way to encourage them to lend their voice to the conversation. Any time you can show young people that you support gay friends and that there are gay people in the world who are lovely, happy, singing, and in love, it opens their minds.
What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.
It's no use imagining that bringing great writers together inevitably precipitates great conversation.
We've seen computers play chess and beat grand masters. We've seen computers drive a car across a desert. But interestingly, playing chess is easy, but having a conversation about nothing is really difficult for a computer.
It's fun to just get out there and have a nice conversation when I'm running. To be honest, when I do longer runs, the trail that I like to run up in Malibu has mountain lions, so I always feel I want to run with someone else.
I think you could argue that President Obama could have watched a little cable news... I do think that there is value in understanding where the conversation is and having a little less detachment where the popular conversation is.
When 'Tracks' first came out, I was courted by Sydney Pollack. I had lunch with him, and he opened the conversation with, 'Honey, you ain't gonna like what I'm gonna do to your book.' I really liked him, but I turned him down, because - well, I was stupid. I also turned down a great deal of money.
I'm a great admirer of secularism. At its best, I think it's one of the best things that we have. I don't believe in insinuating religion into conversation. I don't believe in excluding it from conversation. I enjoy the fact that people's innermost thoughts are their own.
I've walked away in the middle of a conversation and had no idea that was wrong until someone told me I was being rude.
One of the greatest experiences I ever had was listening to a conversation with Joni Mitchell and Wayne Shorter. Just to hear them talking, my mouth was open. They understand each other perfectly, and they make these leaps and jumps because they don't have to explain anything.
My entire life had been this long, pressured conversation about the family I represented. 'When you walk out the door, you represent us. You have to dress well and make sure your hair is combed.'
The whole being-in-a-room interview thing, at a junket or a film festival, is very inhuman. You meet the person, have five or 10 minutes to talk, and it's not like a conversation.
After 'Roe v. Wade' - when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973 - I thought the national conversation about abortion and birth control would be over. It was not.
