Quotes About Words

I love puns and plays on words, which is why I love RuPaul so much.

An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. That's the beauty of it. It's not taxing to the listener's intelligence because if you haven't heard it the first time round, it'll come around again.

For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible - and no one can now doubt the word of America.

I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.

People used to ask me questions on my blog about how to break into the acting industry. You often have to start out in parts where you have very few words, but you still have to try to make an impact.

I believe words should amaze or amuse. Only then will the listener want to understand the meaning of the song.

I've spent a lot of words on my own mortality.

When you reach the editing stage, it is often the case that you can get too involved with the story to detect errors. You can see words in your head that aren't actually there on the page, sentences blur together and errors escape you, and you follow plot threads and see only the images in your skull.

I'm disturbed by the words missing from the Trump campaign: Liberty, justice, freedom, and tolerance.

On January 3, 2019, I swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. It was the third time in my life of public service that I had taken such an oath, but the words were just as profound to me as the first time I spoke them.

I go to schools in L.A., and I teach lessons. I run with the girls and teach them things about bullying and gossip. For instance, we'd play things like telephone, where you can actually see how words get twisted.

Sometimes words are just music themselves. Like 'Chicago' is a very musical sounding name.

I seem to be the most wordy when it comes to monsters because I'm a bit of a monster freak.

There are words I don't want to say in my music. Some will say: 'Don't forget me.' I prefer: 'Always remember me.' I'm very wordy and psychological.

Let's be clear - for people like me, who are obsessed with story and for whom words are their medium, writing is the best job possible. I work hard, but I earn more than the national average wage while I play with my imagination, and for me, that's a dream.

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.

Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.

Certainly, writing a book was challenging. It took me a long time to learn how to do it. It took me seven years to get a sense of how to wean myself off the process and trickery of songwriting. You realize that giant metaphors work in songs because you have so few words. Standing alone on a page, they threaten to be overblown in a hurry.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

When I read period material - and it ain't on Google - I am always alert for that one incredible detail. I'll read a whole book and get three words out of it, but they'll be three really good words.

Like they used to say about Joe Montana, he threw soft because he couldn't throw hard. He was successful because he didn't try to do what he couldn't. I couldn't rock out harder than everybody, or overpower people with mastery like Jack White of the White Stripes, so why try? That's why I've always worked harder on words.

I've always liked texts that you immediately understand. I suppose the playwrights who really speak to me are Edward Bond, Joe Orton and Harold Pinter. I've been in six different Pinter productions - I love the clarity of his language. He has this way of using words - there's a thrill to them.

I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away.

I've learnt the power of words. I've had the worst thrown at me.