David Lodge Quotes

One of the glories of English simplicity is the possibility of using the same word as noun and verb.

I had tremendous fun fooling around with the way people talked about songs, just the way that became another way of understanding the world.

I've found the world's most versatile word - 'cheeky.' The amount of ways you guys can use the word 'cheeky' is quite impressive.

'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'

Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?

The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately UNDERSTOOD by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar.

I saw what could be done with words, for I had a vision of a new world as I talked.

Everything I do, I want to take it to the farthest possible degree. I can't just do something the plain way. I don't cook a bowl of pasta; it has to be puff pastry swans.

Never be afraid of a cliché, if it expresses what you wish to say.

Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out - helping OTHERS move inward - it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement.

Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.

Art is a word which summarizes the quality of communication.

Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

Art is communication.

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

I wanted to write and then I saw Pierrot and I understand that I could express myself in a more... Also probably, I had an intuition that if I was going to only write, I will stay in one room all the time and never go out. I felt that if I was going to make movies, I would have to communicate with people and it would be good for me.

What I am after, above all, is expression.

The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.

So all my best is dressing old words new.

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.