The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive.
For the novice runner, I'd say to give yourself at least 2 months of consistently running several times a week at a conversational pace before deciding whether you want to stick with it. Consistency is the most important aspect of training at this point.
I tend to be conversational and loose with dialogue in general, not out of disrespect for the source material but because that's the way I work.
My last album as J. Tillman, 'Singing Ax,' that was really a premeditated death rattle of the aesthetic precedent I had set. I realized I wasn't creating spontaneously; I was enforcing all these parameters. I was too self-loathing or something, and there was this obvious dissonance between my conversational voice and creative voice.
Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.
Nothing dates one so dreadfully as to think someplace is uptown. At our age one must be watchful of these conversational gray hairs.
What they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door. They've made it conversational. People go out and upgrade their toilet. They talk about it. They've sanitized it.
If you're doing an interview, you need conversational tension. After you talk to them, you're not going to have a relationship with them, they're not going to like you, they're not going to be your friend.
I just love the whole idea of conversational prints.
I was born in Scotland and have lived there all my life. I speak conversational Cantonese with my dad when I'm at home, and very basic Mandarin.