Quotes About Language

I call myself a harp because I like the sound of the word - it is short, sharp, and abusive.

It's better to use a curse word than to hurt somebody else, I find.

It's one thing looking up your own book in a library, but imagine being able to look up your own word in the dictionary.

Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

The reason I keep talking about a wife and saying the word 'wife' on stage is because it seems a funny word to me. The more you say it, the more it seems to detach from that person and become this sort of abstract thing: that you would set out to find a wife, that it would be an objective like buying a new car.

The trouble with the dictionary is that you have to know how a word is spelled before you can look it up to see how it is spelled.

If you can't pronounce a word correctly, just don't use it.

Language is ever on the move, and most days, I check out the 'Urban Dictionary' where anyone can invent a new and useful word or phrase.

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

'Design' is a word that's come to mean so much that it's also a word that has come to mean nothing.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

Every time I get in an Uber in L.A., they're like, 'Oh, great accent. Are you from Australia?' I constantly have to repeat myself when I'm in North America because no one understands a word I'm saying.

I went to Paris when I was 17 and would sit in a cafe called Les Deux Magots, in the Latin Quarter. I spoke English, but not a word of French.

At the age of nine, I simultaneously fell in love with two Dutch sisters because they seemed so beautifully strange, and their clothes were mysterious and alluring - added to which, they could not speak a word of English. More than anything, I wanted to connect with them and embark on a vast journey of exploration.

There was a time when it was important culturally to have the word 'actress,' I suppose, but when it comes to awards ceremonies, we don't have 'Best Directress' or 'Best Cinematographeress!'

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

I feel, as I get older and now a father, I try to be a little more conscious of the things I would say and do. I try to be more creative as opposed to using a cheap word, cursing, or something vulgar to get a reaction.

The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.

Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge'... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.

You have to be careful how you're using the word boycott.

You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.