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Listening is a more difficult idea than it sounds. To listen, you have to be aiming for more than just a core point to seize upon-- you must also want to understand why the person is saying this, and what that person is feeling. To pull it off successfully you need something called an attention span. But don't worry! The art of listening is alive and well, and I know several of its practitioners.
Although I am often living in my own little world when people talk to me, a habit formed from years of having irrelevant and boring things repeated at me for hours at a time, I am also a moderately skilled listener. Indeed, it might be accurate to say I do more listening than talking. Unfortunately, these days you need to do a lot of talking, and very little listening, to stay in the game. The conversations I hear among friends, even at one of the best colleges in the country, are frequently of little substance. Perhaps this is because everyone is in a hurry to say something. Coming here from a high school where I hardly ever said anything, I have had to train myself to come up with witty, meaningless split-second responses such as "that's what she said."
Listening is a key point of Momo, and one of Ende's least preachy opinions.