Quotes About Language

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Forever encased in the amber of a writer's prose.

I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.

The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real, for a moment at least, that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is an 'F' word that hopefully the five second delay won't do anything with.

Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.

The worshipful father and first founder and embellisher of ornate eloquence in our English, I mean Master Geoffrey Chaucer.

I was raised in Chicago, so always used Latina. It's what my Father and brothers called ourselves, when we meant the entire Spanish-speaking community of Chicago.

I came to New York in 1986. My father didn't think it was a good idea. I didn't know how I found it, but I went to Hunter College. I had no money and I couldn't speak English.

Only after my father's death could I speak my own individual truths about him. In a sense, I had to turn him into a character, a figure I could control through language.

Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words since I first called my brother's father dad.

Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

The habit of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional.

I suffer from two phobias: 1) Phobia-Phobia, the fear that you're unable to get scared, and 2) Xylophataquieopiaphobia, the fear of not pronouncing words correctly.

What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread

Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke. This can be tricky.

I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.

In love... the heart got a language, the eyes got dreams and life got its meaning

Quotes are nothing but inspiration for the uninspired. Reality is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes.

Time doesn't exist. What we refer to as past and future have no reality except in our own mental constructs. The idea of time is a convention of thought and language, a social agreement; in truth we only have this moment.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

Always use tasteful words - you may have to eat them.