Education Quote by Christopher Morley

A good talker, Morley suggests, is mostly a good reader of people. The line flips the usual performance anxiety around conversation: instead of hunting for cleverness, you cultivate attention. It’s a sly demotion of the ego, delivered as a “rule” so simple it sounds like common sense - until you notice how rarely anyone follows it.

Morley was a literary man in an America being remade by mass media, advertising, and the early cult of personality. In that context, “talking well” could easily drift toward selling, pitching, charming. His corrective is almost moral: listening isn’t just a technique, it’s a posture. The subtext is that the best speakers don’t dominate; they triangulate. They gather tone, hesitation, what’s not being said. Then they respond in a way that makes the other person feel intelligible, even interesting. That’s the secret of charisma that can’t be faked for long.

The line also carries a quiet rebuke to social status games. Talking often functions as a bid for control - the conversational equivalent of taking up space. Listening, by contrast, redistributes power. It signals you’re not threatened by silence, not desperate to be seen. That confidence reads as intelligence.

Morley’s wit is in the paradox: he defines “being a good talker” as doing something that isn’t talking. The sentence is a small trap for the self-impressed, and a practical gift to everyone else.