Quotes About Language

... but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

90 percent of the time the terms are misused or unnecessary. Not every image obtained from a computer is a screen shot.

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.

I spent a lot of time in London when I was growing up and I've always picked up accents without even really meaning to. It used to get me into trouble as a child.

Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.

I don't have a problem rhyming "bar" with "car" - I do it all the time - but sometimes it doesn't feel right.

As you see, context is everything and nothing at the same time. Words stand alone and with each other.

I've done a bit of Latin in my time...but I can control it.

It's not difficult to sing in German; it's difficult to feel in German. This takes time. It's a culture.

As a matter of fact, Latin America's economy is almost as big as the economy of China. We're all focused on China. Latin America is a huge opportunity for America - time zone, language opportunities.

Vulgarity finds its antidote; old crudities become softened with time. Distinctions, both those that are useful and those that are burdensome, flourish and die, reflourish and die again.

The act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.

Not for the first time, I wished both of us could just say what we meant. But that, like so much else, was impossible

Some people are born with the first word of a language resting on their tongue though it may take some time before they can taste it.

Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.

brb, ttyl ok? wow, i saved a 'ton' of time with those acronyms.

I love theater. I go all the time. It's one of the reasons I moved to New York. But I understand that I have limited range as an actor. I can only play people who talk like me.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

I must make a choice every time I speak a sentence in English. I try to choose the happier way of saying things, so that my own words will not weigh me down like stones.

This unique strategy that the advanced primates created, the strategy of using language to bind time, is what the process we call 'civilization' has been all about.

It's harder to make something good when you can't curse all the time.

I think I have a very strange, hybrid accent, and I've worked very hard to get a solid American accent, which is what I use most of the time.

The first time I went to Mexico, it was really difficult. Number one is the language, I didn't know any Spanish language. Of course, the culture itself. Very different from where I grew up.