Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.

Language is like songs, like food, like dance-it is the expression of what we think.

Lie, illusion, deception, she said–was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?

My definition of dictionary can’t be found in the dictionary. Dictionary—A linguistic prison, confining words to well-defined cells, with little chance of parole.

A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life...

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything’s handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture,...

The power of language – it can heal and build, or corrupt, poison, destroy, desecrate, annihilate…

There’s probably a word for that,” but there’s probably a word for that.

Greek 201 is always easier than Greek 101, because at first it’s all Greek to you, and later the material is still all new, but it’s not so foreign as it was in the beginning.

Ils en conclurent que la syntaxe est une fantaisie et la grammaire une illusion.

Thank God for modern medicine. It was not until 1905 that ergophobia (the morbid fear of returning to work) was first identified and reported in the British Medical Journal. As yet there is no known...

Mocho was a Spanish word that meant maimed or referred to something that had been lopped off like a stump. To call Homer el mocho was, essentially, to call him “Stumpy” or “the maimed one.”...

There’s been a lot of work on bilingualism. Interpretation goes one step beyond that because the two languages are active simultaneously. And not just in one modality, because you have perception and production at the...

Jokes are many things. ‘Funny’ is only one of them.

The topics which language limits us to aren’t much worth discussing in the first place.(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

A niechaj narodowie wżdy postronni znają,Iż Polacy nie gęsi, iż swój język mają.

Language is the light of the mind.

Why only one song, one speech, one text at a time?” – “When Our Lips Speak Together

Time is the cosmic language.

The limits of my language means the limits of my world.

We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the...

She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there’d be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than...

I don’t know if I’m truly at home in any language.

To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites.

When I was a kid, it was thought I would do something in the visual arts because I was always drawing, but when we emigrated to Australia from Holland when I was seven, I learnt...

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language’s capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be...

Well, what if you are wrong? What if the world doesn’t work the way you think? What would that mean?

Tolkien made dwarf sign language because, you know, it’s too loud to talk in the mines.

Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down.

I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today — whatever that may be....

I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there.

Guh” from a fisherman caught in surprise on Lake Simcoe. The echoing coves of the lake added a sort of meter, and by the time these sounds arrived in Gravenhurst, the people there were certain...

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

He doesn’t know what language is. He has been totally isolated,

That was the hard thing about grief, and the grieving. They spoke another language, and the words we knew always fell short of what we wanted them to say.

Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details?

Alphabet: a symbolic system used in algebra, with applications that have yet to be discovered by dyslexics and two thirds of college graduates.

Il linguaggio umano è, in fondo, il grande scandalo della natura: il linguaggio umano costringe a riconoscere una discontinuità immotivata e improvvisa tra gli esseri viventi.

My first language was shy. It’s only by having been thrust into the limelight that I have learned to cope with my shyness.

Yet from time to time we are betrayed by language, if not in the words themselves, in the rhythm with which we deliver our words. Over time, I would learn to listen for those wonderful...

The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination—not vice versa.

One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language.

In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.

Hey dawg, wassup?” he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an attempt to sound like young black men from underprivileged backgrounds. A linguistic fashion as peculiar as...

Mikä etu, mikä verraton taivaan lahja onkaan mielihyvän ilmaisemisen taito äänin ja elein. – Ensin hyräilin, sitten sain tuon jäljittelemättömän kyvyn heilautella häntääni mitä siroimmissa kiekuroissa, sitten ihmeellisen lahjan ilmaista yhdellä pikku sanalla iloa, surua,...

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

The process of filmmaking is very musical, you get into the rhythm and the rhythmics of how someone is, especially with Woody Allen who is very much into body language and body movement.

I mutter and mutter and no one to listen. I speak my words in Japanese and my daughter will not hear them. The words that come from our ears, our mouths, they collide in the...