Peter Brook Quotes

We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.

Words aren't made — they grow,' said Anne.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

My parents told me I'd point to a bed of flowers and say 'Pink. Pretty,' before I knew any other words.

When a language begins to teem with books, it is tending to refinement; as those who undertake to teach others must have undergone some labour in improving themselves, they set a proportionate value on their own thoughts, and wish to enforce them by efficacious expressions; speech becomes embodied and permanent; different modes and phrases are compared, and the best obtains an establishment. By degrees one age improves upon another.

I have not suggested that the emergence of language is instantaneous. Rather, that the rewiring of the brain enabling an infinite array of structured expressions was in effect instantaneous. I have never heard of an alternative to this suggestion.

Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style is a thinking out into language.

I believe every change any word has undergone probably originated in ignorance.

A lot of people think that kids say the darnedest things. But so would you if you had no education. You'd just be like, I am bike cheese. Because you wouldn't know what words were.

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

Language is a form of organized stutter.

Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality.

A sound waiting to be a word.

At one year of age the child says his first intentional wordhis babbling has a purpose, and this intention is a proof of conscious intelligenceHe becomes ever more aware that language refers to his surroundings, and his wish to master it consciously becomes also greater.Subconsciously and unaided, he strains himself to learn, and this effort makes his success all the more astonishing.

God gave you that gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning to us, not to be rattled like a muffin man's bell.

I am comfortable with my level of public discourse.

There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle.

Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes.

Children and savages use only nouns or names of things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences...Language and knowledge are indissolubly connected; they are interdependent. Good work in language presupposes and depends on a real knowledge of things.

Language is what books do very well and movement is what movies does very well.

In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.

All last year we tried to teach him (Fernando Valenzuela) English, and the only word he learned was million.