Quotes About Language

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.

I'm not like a champion of profanity. I write what I hear, and the characters that I write, that's how they talk. That's how I talk a lot of the time. So I'm not trying to advance a social cause.

As I read more and more - and it was not all verse, by any means - my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.

Why does 'writer' have no gender, but 'actor' has a gender? What is that?

Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana.

Somehow, as a writer, you tend to use words to paper over structural cracks.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer.

I am an artist and have no right buggering about with verbs and split infinitives, which is what being a writer says to me.

I am not a writer, but I have been told I write good emails.

A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.

Writers speak stench.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

An excellent habit to cultivate is the analytical study of the King James Bible. For simple yet rich and forceful English, this masterly production is hard to equal; and even though its Saxon vocabulary and poetic rhythm be unsuited to general composition, it is an invaluable model for writers on quaint or imaginative themes.

Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.

Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.

I think the best writers use the language they use every day when they talk to friends. When we talk to each other, we tend to talk in short grabs rather than in long flowing sentences. I think that's not a bad way to write.

Politics, which really is about the art of expression, ought to be a logical profession for writers (it's very hard to explain to politics- and policy-addicted people that language is the basis of all ideas - if you can't say it, you can't think it), instead of a refuge for lawyers and apparatchiks.

My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.

While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.