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I'm a storyteller. I feel like the issue of discourse is an important one because there's a lot of political and ideological discourse that goes around, and we relate to that on an intellectual level.

Every argument is incapable of helping unless it is singular and addressed to a single person. Therefore, one who discourses in any other way presumably does so from love of reputation.

I'm in the civil discourse business. I think it takes all kinds. And more power to everybody.

I am a plain man, and I care and know comparatively little about rhetoric.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others.

I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.

A good discourse is that from which nothing can be retrenched without cutting into the quick.

I think that what I do, in terms of how I craft my words rhetorically, is fairly simple stuff. I don't mean that to denigrate myself. I mean that in the sense of, when I write, the person that I keep in mind is my mother-in-law.