Quotes About Language

V S Naipaul] brings to [literary narrative] an extraordinary capacity for making art out of lucid thought. Observe hard, think even harder, figure out what you are thinking in the simplest, clearest language, and you will arrive at narrative: that is his credo.

Come quasi tutti i lettori, a volte ho la sensazione di essere nata leggendo".

I never found accents difficult, after learning languages.

English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.

We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

Words without experience are meaningless.

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

My English is very bad.

?? ???? ? ?????? ?????????? ?????, ? ?? – nicht zweifelnd und bitter, ???????? ? ? ?????? ?????? ?? ??, ??? ?? ???????????? ??????.

Tears are the silent language of grief

If you wish to converse with me, define your terms

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

English, like any other natural language, has two major communicative functions. The first is an ideational function: to get an idea across, as when I say, It's raining, or I love you. It also has an interactive-interpersonal function: to influence the attitudes and behaviours of others, and, in a myriad ways, change an aspect of the world's states of affairs in the process

a Jewish convert to the Church, Henry Miller, who discovered that the entire Book of Mormon could be written on 41 pages if the Hebrew alphabet were used and on 81 pages if the ancient Semitic alphabet (sometimes called Phoenician or Old Israelitic) were used. Photographic plates of Henry Miller's translations will be found on pages 40 and 41 of J. M. Sjodahl's book, An Introduction To the Study of the Book of Mormon.

It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survivesIn the valley of its saying where executivesWould never want to tamper

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.

Words have no word for words that are not true.

when the ego disappears, so does power over language.

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.