Quotes About Language

Probably 60% of my followers are from Argentina, so I tweet more in Spanish.

When I tweet in English, Spanish people get mad at me. When I tweet in Spanish, English people get mad at me. You never can be 100 percent for everybody, you know. I try to do both, at the same time; but it's hard.

I made a Twitter account when I was 10 years old. I wasn't even trying to be funny. I was still tweeting in Indonesian. I didn't really speak English yet.

Trawl through the world of blogs and tweets, and you will find readers complaining when they stumble upon a word they don't recognise, an attitude that doesn't accord with their own, a passage of thought they find hard work, a joke they don't get or of which they don't approve.

I used to cuss in my tweets, and now I don't.

I'm not a native English speaker but do post tweets in English.

I'm still kinda old-school. We're twittering, and we're all twitterers. And we write tweets. The only thing I don't love is twits.

Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them.

With twenty six letters, you can create anything you like - any person, any world, any place, any emotion. And they are so potent, so powerful, and at the same time, they're marks on the page, and that's all. There's nothing else to them.

David Foster Wallace, in my opinion, is one of the greatest writers we've ever had, certainly in the last twenty years. His obvious dominance of the English language is partnered with honest moments and the most beautifully dark sensibility.

The seed for my novel 'Half Brother' was planted in my mind over twenty years ago, but didn't germinate until late 2007 when I came across the obituary for Washoe, an extraordinary chimpanzee who had learned over 250 words of American Sign Language.

My father's really fluent in French, but I can't speak at all. I actually took it twice in school already and failed both times!

Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.

One of the main things about Cockney is, you speak at twice the speed as Americans. Americans speak very slow.

A hamburger by any other name costs twice as much.

You know one little way in which baseball changes us? We don't even think twice about Japanese names anymore. You know what I mean?

If you grow up in Britain, you just do Shakespeare. If you go and work in a theater once or twice or three times in your life, you're going to end up doing a Shakespeare, because he's obviously such a brilliant, brilliant writer.

I write my novels in English first; then they are translated into Turkish by professional translators. Then I take their translation and rewrite. So basically, I write the same novel twice.

Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions.

We cannot rely on our native tongue if our spouse does not understand it. If we want them to feel the love we are trying to communicate, we must express it in his or her primary love language.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

We have to come back to something like ordinary language after all when we want to talk "about" mathematics!

Sovereign," like "love," means anything you want it to mean; it's a word in dictionary between "sober" and "sozzled.

I don't do emoticons unless I'm making a big deal out of them. I'll type out, 'This is so amusing it makes me want to grin in pixels.' And then do it.