Quotes About Language

It's good for a story to have a strong style.

At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects.

Fashion is a language, and therefore says something about politics, and certain fashion styles get associated with certain political standpoints.

The books I love most are the ones that combine some sort of gripping story with really beautiful or stylish writing. Some of my favorites are 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, 'The Virgin Suicides' by Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Interpreter of Maladies' by Jhumpa Lahiri, and 'Blindness' by Jose Saramago.

Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.

Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.

English was always my favorite subject.

Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.

I live in London and I am a British subject, although I do write in Spanish, of course.

I am interested in the subject which is Russia.

Words can make the illness a subject I can master, and not one that one simply emotes over.

What provides you with subject matter is your own language - and that's all.

Music is very subjective. You may or may not like a song, but folk and regional language have a connectivity that binds different people together, who slowly begin to relate to it.

The purpose of language is to communicate. That's the most basic definition of language. I have my own subjective experience going on in my head, and you have your own subjective experience going on in your head. The only way we can bridge that unbridgeable gap is through language.

It's liberating to perform in another language. There are some subjects I would never talk about in French, where they see me as a public figure, that I talk about in English.

No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.

'Minari' was only eligible for the best foreign language film category due to the HFPA rules on language, so the film was submitted to meet these rules; there was no choice involved in the matter.

Some of the substance of English words, I just don't understand at all because the culture's so strange to me.

I love words, but I also love finding out that there is a word for something that you've experienced but didn't know there was a word for. Like 'toothpack' - that is a word for when you eat biscuits or cookies and you get that annoying layer of chewed substance on your molars that you kind of have to pick out.

Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.

Literally' - I'm not having it; people can't go around saying 'literally.' Otherwise, what's literal? There's not another word for literally: if it isn't figurative or metaphorical, what is it? It's literal: there's no substitute.

I could list hundreds of words I've come up against in the course of my work that did not exist in the era of which I was writing and for which I never could find a suitably old-time, archaic or obsolete substitute.

People will now go to films with subtitles, you know. They're not afraid of them. It's one of the upsides of text-messaging and e-mail. Maybe the only good thing to come of it.

I've always seen movies in English with Spanish subtitles. For audiences around the world, the language is less important than if it's a good film.