Quotes About Language

I could hum Beatles songs before I could talk - not very well, but sort of.

The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing.

How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty.

I have written some of the clumsiest, most clogged-yet-vagrant, hobbledehoyish, hitch-slipping sentences ever conceived by the human mind.

The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.

I am very interested in the human voice and how we use it, especially when we aren't thinking, like the kind of stuff Robert Ashley was interested in.

You have to have a little humility if you're Danish because you're never going to be able to travel outside the country unless you can speak another language.

The English probably do that wordplay kind of humour and whimsy better than anyone, and I've always felt that my writing goes more to that than what I did when I came to Australia.

We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.

Good art-writers break conventions, hold a few sacrosanct, innovate their own. They measure their limits by instinct, not by rote. Mostly they learn by seeing miles of art, and reading good literature in bulk. There is no substitute, for a writer, for possessing a natural ear for language; a rich vocabulary; a flair for varied sentence structures; an original opinion; some arresting ideas to share. I can teach you none of that.

It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.

Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.

A great writer is always like a foreigner in the language which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur.

It's a strange business, speaking for yourself, because it doesn't at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject.

Nismo ni fizi?ari, ni metafizi?ari: moramo da budemo egiptolozi. ... Ne postoje ni stvari, ni duhovi, postoje samo tela: astralna tela, biljna tela. Biologija bi bila u pravu kad bi znala da su tela sama u sebi ve? jezik.

le langage de Sade est paradoxal parce qu'il est essentiellement celui d'une victime. Il n'y a que les victimes qui peuvent décrire les tortures, les bourreaux emploient nécessairement le langage hypocrite de l'ordre et du pouvoir établis

I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

I'll be interested to hear what the swine has to say for himself," he says. Desi rarely says jackfuck or shitbag; he says swine, which sounds more poisonous on his lips.

Las palabras permanecían en silencio.

It was certainly easy making conversation with this woman. You didn't even have to know the native tongue.

Rambling speeches and bad writing litter our lives. If talk is cheap, it's because the supply usually exceeds the demand.

As a writer, I roll around in words the way cats roll around in catnip.