J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

Grammar is the analysis of language.

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.

My mother taught me how to write.

I have great respect for the semicolon; it is a mighty handy little fellow.

I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?

If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

I don't like it when people don't know the difference between 'their', 'they're', 'there'.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

… a barbarian who could not write one sentence of grammar.

I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing - playing with language and getting just the right metaphor.

I'm quite obsessed with words.

When I was younger, I would write a ton, mostly because my mom told me I had incredible creativity and a gift of using words, only these were words that didn't get me in trouble.

I keep a big, fat dictionary with me while writing.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence - not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. You can see for yourself how many different ways they might be arranged.

Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

I think a lot of the way that I try to write my stories come from watching my mom write plays and trying to do that.