Quotes About Language

The Americans are very clear, and obsessed with nouns.

Further, I'm obsessed with how language contorts and creates bodies.

I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational.

I love accents in general. I'm obsessed with dialects, and I had to write a whole movie about it called 'In a World...'

The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.

I have a weird obsession with people who can speak multiple languages. I'd love to be able to do that.

If you have a good ear for dialogue, you just can't help thinking about the way people talk. You're drawn to it. And the obsessive interest in it forces you to develop it. You almost can't help yourself.

I used to say the wealthiest among us have to pay our fair share, which I still occasionally say. That's not dodging the word 'millionaire.'

You men are a bunch of god-damned women.

The words we speak have a direct and definite effect upon our thoughts. Thoughts create words, for words are the vehicles of ideas. But words also affect thoughts and help to condition if not to create attitudes. In fact, what often passes for thinking starts with talk.

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93]

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. [p.92]

The written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it recreates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.

What the critic as a teacher of language tries to teach is not an elegant accomplishment, but the means of conscious life. Literary education should lead not merely to the admiration of great literature, but to some possession of its power of utterance. The ultimate aim is an ethical and participating aim, not an aesthetic or contemplative one, even though the latter may be the means of achieving the former.

The only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain point: the most faithfully descriptive account of anything will always turn away from what it describes into its own self-contained grammatical fictions of subject and predicate and object.

In this box are all the words I know…Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is to use them well and in the right places.

I never knew words could be so confusing, Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear. Only when you use a lot to say a little, answered Tock. Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he'd heard all day.

We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don't care if they make sense or nonsense.

Where is the sound? someone hastily scribbled on the blackboard, and they all waited anxiously for the reply. Milo caught his breath, picked up the chalk, and explained simply, It's on the tip of my tongue.

And that's why people no longer care which words they use as long as they use lots of them.

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect.

Ali zar u buci nema i dobrih zvukova?

Milo had never thought much about words before, but these looked so good that he longed to have some. "Look, Tock," he cried, "aren't they wonderful?" "They're fine, if you have something to say