"Most kids start talking by age two. I didn't say a word until I was twelve. I was just angry and defiant I guess. My first word wasn't "Mom" or "Dad." It was "No.

Alongside of the rare cases of true conversation where there is a genuine interchange of opinions or commands, one can observe in children between 2 and 6 a characteristic type of pseudo-conversation or "collective monologue", during which the children speak only for themselves, although they wish to be in the presence of interlocutors who will serve as a stimulus. Now here again, each feels himself to be in communion with the group because he is inwardly addressing the Adult who knows and understands everything, but here again, each is only concerned with himself, for lack of having dissociated the "ego" from the "socius".

I did not speak until I was 16. I understood everything everyone said and I would want to talk, but I just didn't know how to say it.

Even his conversation was, as it were, a spoken part.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Just at the age 'twixt boy and youth,
When thought is speech, and speech is truth.

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk without self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

It was definitely the first time my son came with me to a speaking engagement at the London office of one of the world’s largest law firms. He was only 9 years old but immediately started ‘working the room’ and networking with others. He spoke to everyone from the receptionist to senior partners of the firm. I have a picture of him sitting on the balcony with the firm’s global chair, having a conversation, a priceless and memorable moment

The child speaks words with his memory long before he speaks them with his tongue.

I do not know why a girl should be expected to talk well till she is at least twenty. There cannot be much in her, she may be prettily exacting, or charmingly modest, but her attractions must be personal, not intellectual.

During what years should a child be introduced to better ways of giving and receiving criticisms – to what I call “relationship language”? Before school age. The best teacher? Parents.

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk with self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

The naïve comments of a well born child sometimes express a very attractive philosophy.