Quotes About Language

The language marches in step with the executioners. Therefore we must get a new language.

I feel more pressure when I'm writing for teens. I'm very aware that my audience is impressionable. Therefore, I'm far more careful about what I say and the language I use.

My guilty pleasure at the end of the day is an old thesaurus. I know that can lead to overwriting, but if words such as lambent, pyretic and boscy exist, how sad they should stay recondite.

I ended up doing four or five plays in college and being an English major with my thesis in language acquisition, which I was planning to study in graduate school.

Propositions show what they say: tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.

When I learned Japanese, they say that I sounded like a Chinese with diarrhea!

I don't know if English is the only language where some expressions only and solely mean the opposite of what they say but we do have an awful lot of them.

I've played all through the Middle East. The Arabs never say what they mean. They say what they think you want to hear.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

The advantage of the gypsy language, even though I don't understand it that much, the language is perfect melody. So if you propose the movie the way I do, then the language is just one part of the melody. Orchestrating all inside, and the language is following the meaning of what they say, and it's never the same as written.

I've gone into auditions, and I think they have an assumption about me when they see my photo, and then I open my mouth, and they say, 'Where exactly are you from? And you were born in Ethiopia? But you're Irish, but you also kind of sound English. That's really strange.'

Yes, Vajpayee and Advani are very clever speakers, but that does not mean everything they say is true.

A lot of young people don't have a lot of faith in politicians. You can't depend on what they say. They talk in circles. They don't speak the kind of language that has truth to them. I'm speaking differently.

I grew up in the Middle East. My folks have a very thick, kind of Oklahoma accent; that's where I was born. But we moved to the Middle East right after I was born, so I guess we were surrounded by English people and French people.

I'd defend the right for any novelist to experiment with form or language, but if people don't take to it, don't react by making out that they are thick.

I contend, most seriously, that there is a real need for a good, thick, complete-as-possible dictionary of 'What People Used to Call Things.'

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a 'fresh' brain - one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.

To an Ohio boy, it represented world-weary Gallic shrugs and Gauloises cigarettes, existentialist thinkers in berets and Catherine Deneuve in nothing at all - French was the language of intellectual power and effortless sex appeal.

When you're speaking Spanish, you're thinking in a different way.

I will not compromise on language or content. At 15, people can handle the same language as me, they're just as complicated as me and are very interested in thinking about important questions for the first time.

Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.

Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

A lot of Latinos are like me: third generation, English speaking.