Quotes About Language

Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.

Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.

Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.

I'm very bad at ending sentences. A lot times I just want to say, 'That's the end of my sentence. I have nothing more to say.'

At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.

It's much easier to identify and fix problems in language and timing when you hear the words being read.

My mind is stuffed with quotes. Lines, couplets, paragraphs, stanzas; Bessie Smith, Stevie Smith, Tin Pan Alley, rock and roll. They tease or lead or hurl me into a dream space of jostling languages that I need to bask in each day in order to write.

My Chinese name is Chen Wei. I can speak a tiny, tiny bit, just basically get around, but I understand it decently well.

Don't let the American twang fool you. I still say, 'I'm going home,' when I come to England, and I love a good old cup of PG Tips with a Jaffa Cake.

Call me a midget, but just be real. I am all for correct terms, but please don't tiptoe around feelings. Don't be too careful, because that shuts you off from people.

'Duch' means spirit and 'ovny' is kind of the adjectival ending, so the word itself means spiritual. It's my father's name, obviously. He took the 'H' out because he was tired of people saying Duchovny, but he never did it legally. When my parents divorced, my mother, to my father, put the 'H' back in.

I was really tired of words like 'plus size,' 'round' and 'large.' I thought, 'Come on, we're fat.'

I don't see how English as we use it in Europe can be revivified. It's like Latin must have been in about A.D. 300, tired and used up. All one can do is press very hard stylistically to make it glow.

It's so easy to use tired, shopworn figures of speech. I love using long, fancy words but have learned - mostly from writing my biography of Winston Churchill - that short, strong words work better. I am ever-vigilant against the passive and against jargon, both of which are so insidious.

It is the children between five and seven who are the word-lovers. It is they who show a predisposition toward such study. Their undeveloped minds can not yet grasp a complete idea with distinctness. They do, however, understand words. And they may be entirely carried away by their ecstatic, their tireless interest in the parts of speech.

My fake Japanese was smooth enough to earn me the title of 'The Emperor of Pleasing Graciousness' in that country.

It's good to have a title that's not just one word. If you're gonna title it, you might as well try and say something.

'Words, Words, Words' was very much its title. It's just words, words, words and trying to show that I can pack as much material into an hour as I possibly could word count-wise.

It's a big statement if you use the word 'America' in the title of your poem.

I really hate having to put 'female' in front of any title, because it puts us in some kind of weird category for handicapped people or something.

If it's a Hindi film, it has to have a Hindi title.

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

During the 1980s, when Japan's economy was roaring and people were writing books with titles like 'Japan is Number One,' most Japanese college students didn't make the effort to become fluent in English.

Guardiola is the best because he has won so many titles, because of the way he did it, and because he's adapted to another country with a very difficult language, and he's implanted his ideas.