Quotes
Quotes about Language
This places what we must vaguely term slang into the right perspective - the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demonic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.
There is no limit to the modes in which language can be used to lie, obfuscate, worry, even kill.
The study of language may beget madness
It is probably easier to make language appeal to the emotions - which usually means the prejudices - than to the understanding.
On the English Language: A barren land, full of thorn bushes and with birds with strange cries
Only the poetical enquiry can discover what language really is
You have to learn to be alone â no sex, not even any books. All youâll have is language, the great conserver, and poetry, the great isolate shaper. Stock your minds with language, for Christâs sake. Learn how to write whatâs memorable. No, not write â compose in your head.
Music is considered an international language, yet it tends to gross insularity.
The English language is not yet, except in the nonsense of "Jabberwocky", ready for the fusing of two or more words into a new complex entity.
There are two things in the world - language and everything that is not language
A highly sophisticated society will always be tempted to accord language a reality of its own
The novel form calls for a rigidity of control of the linguistic medium which forbids the freer art of the poet. Language must be transparent, not opaque.
Any serious literary artist envies music, which has an apparently self-referrÃng language, cannot preach or inform, and totally identifies form and content
That what language is for is communication
I believe Nabokov was right in saying that language itself is one of the characters of fiction
On Flaubert's 3 Contes: They are not quite short stories as we know them, then, yet to any modern writer, in whatever language, these are recommended as a fundamental textbook of style
Humanity is unregenerable and hates the language of conformity, since conformity has a whiff of the inhuman about it
The English language has allowed itself to be shackled into a verse system borrowed from the Latin languages, which don't go in for the hammerblows of the natural Saxon
..the people of Tudor England, like the modern Irish, were great talkers. One imagines their speech as rapid, bubbling, both earthily exact and carelessly malapropistic. It was perhaps a McLuhanesque medium, itself its own message and it exhibited the essential function of language - to maintain social contact in the dark.... Speech, when you come to think of it, is not a very exact medium: it is full of stumblings and apologies for not finding the right word; it has to be helped out with animal grunts and the gestures which, one is convinced, represent man's primal mode of communication. Take speech as a flickering auditory candle, and the mere act of maintaining its light becomes enough. Tales, gossip, riddles, word-play pass the time in the dark, and out of these - not out of the need to recount facts or state a case - springs literature.
For the first time it was made clear to me that language was no vehicle of soothing prettiness to warm cold castles that waited for spring ... but a potency of sharp knives and brutal hammers
What in God's name is the difference between a language and a dialect? I'll tell you. A language waves flags and is blown up by politicians. A dialect keeps to things, things, things, street smells and street noises, life
Language itself was perhaps only a ghost of the things of the outer world to which it adhered
English is a curiously expressive language. Womb, room, tomb. It sums up living in three words.
No writer is above language. Writers are language. Each is his own language
Human language disposes to contradiction
