Quotes About Language

It's important to me to work in my own language now and then. I love English, but you can never learn to master a foreign language if you're not brought up with it

I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.

Work on the accent, it will enliven the whole.

Also, I have found that I really like to work in English. It's very strange because it's exactly the opposite of what I thought it would be like.

You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.

Good art has everything you need to know about it in the work, not on a wall label. Art is here to take us beyond language.

You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience.

If you believe that men and women have equal rights, if someone asks if you're feminist, you have to say yes because that is how words work.

I don't have children. I serve the world and I serve God by living as deep within my work as I can, reveling in the language of other times and putting it forth for the world.

Shouldn't "it works like a charm" be said about things that don't work?

I feel like metaphors are best when they spin in place. Like when they work and don't work, or lead to a bigger question.

I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.

For me, speaking is work. It's not like when you breathe.

On the day of the show, I sit down with someone that speaks very good English and someone who speaks the local language very well and work out what I'm going to say.

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

To make dictionaries is dull work.

A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In Brick, the world is born from the words.

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

The best armor against everything around you is to be well educated, to work hard, to be twice as good as if you had to be, to do languages and culture better.

When you deal with a film that takes place in Europe, and you're going to work in English, you'd better work with European actors.

I work, play and do everything in French.