Quotes About Words

I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words.

Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.

America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words.

Words do cut, and they do hurt. It was one thing growing up where you were bullied, but you'd just come home. Now you can't really escape it. It's to a point where you turn off that phone, you live your life, and you try not to let the words of others offend or stop you from being you and living your life.

The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.

I think film writing, you're thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you're thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it's also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.

In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.

We give speeches and pin ribbons onto uniforms, etch names into walls. And all that is fine, but too often, all those tributes, all those words aren't always backed up by action. And that felt like such a stark contrast to me, because, as we all know, our military is all about action.

Many words are not wanting to show that the particular view of each court occasioned the dangers which affected the public tranquillity; yet the whole is charged to my account. Nor is this sufficient.

I really wanted it to be organic and coming from my heart. So, I think maybe the initial thought of wanting to go in that direction, I had to wait until things happened in our world and in our country that fired me up enough where the words came out organically.

My transition from wanting to be a cartoonist to wanting to be a writer may have come about through that friendly opposition, that even-handed pairing, of pictures and words.

Over the time that I followed Warren Buffett, one CFO told me, it's very important to pay attention not only to what Warren Buffett says and what he actually does - often there are subtle differences between the two.

It is not our sexual preferences, the color of our skin, the language we speak, nor the religion we practice that creates friction, hatred and wars amongst in society. It is our words and the words of our leaders that can create that disparity.

Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged.

My interest in words and literature is always changing. And every day of work is different, and it doesn't feel laborious in the way that, say, washing dishes did. I'm quite happy to be doing what I'm doing, and I feel very lucky.

Some days I wonder how I'll get through a whole lifetime of thinking. A life that's just words, words, words, shuffling around in my head. Was I born that way?

She hadn't been born into this world, but she'd been born with the love of words and and she'd found her home.

Only that I just happen to be in love with a certain small-town librarian who is the most caring, wonderful woman I've ever met." Nerves danced through her at the words, spiraling in circles like a gleeful child on a summer afternoon. "I... You're what?

Our actions speak louder than our words with the young child, who cannot help but imitate. Through us, children learn whether or not their initial love and trust in the world were well founded.

And—I don't know—I guess words can't kill you, but I'm afraid that they can. I'm afraid one day someone will say something that destroys me.

Keys to Great Writing by Stephen Wilbers

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.

There is no calamity that right words will not begin to redress.

Language is the archives of history…. Language is fossil poetry.