Quotes About Language

I was writing in English since my school days in Amritsar.

Any sufficiently badly-written science is indistinguishable from magic.

It is a general truth that students of language in every era try to colonize some or all of the other human sciences.

We need to know math to be a good scientist, but math is a language, and we need to learn the language because that's the language of science.

Those English and Scottish know how to do accents.

Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.

I think it made me all that much stronger of a writer when you have to teach yourself how to say words from scratch.

Language is never a problem when you have the screenplay ready.

Film scripts are more important for me than the language of the film.

Despite overwhelming support for the United States to adopt English as its official language, we have still not taken that important step.

Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.

I work with the Oxford Dictionary databases, which sounds really boring, but they're actually fascinating as they show you how current words are being used.

No matter how wonderful the story, it has to move on something, and that is language. The words that I use, the pace, the rhythm and cadences all need to be there. If they're not there, the story is like a boat that just sits there and doesn't move on the ocean.

It was a long time before I understood what the word 'specific' was. I remember being a kid and thinking it was 'pacific,' and being like, 'Can you be more pacific?' And I believed that for maybe five, six years until someone was like, 'It's 'specific.''

To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

I actually tried to learn the dictionary at one point. It didn't work; I only got through the first few pages.

You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.

Shakespeare's words paint pictures in glorious colour in my language. They were written by a man whose use of words fits exactly into Xhosa.

I like to paint pictures with words, 'cause I can't draw for anything.

To me, a drop of oil paint or a xerographic dot are the same thing - they're all just language.

I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.

Language is much closer to film than painting is.

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.