George F. Will Quotes

Reading aloud sounds like a good idea, but honestly, it doesn't work very well. Good dialogue in a book doesn't actually bear much resemblance to real-life dialogue. For example, if you've ever seen a word-for-word transcript of people talking, it doesn't read off the page very well. The trick is to make it *seem* like it's being spoken, not to make it speakable.

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

[On George H.W. Bush:] A man who wishes to lead the Western world should be able to find the right words, string them together in coherent sentences, and steer them to an intelligible conclusion. His sentences have the stuttering start of an old car on a cold morning. They never run smoothly. The only speech part that he has mastered completely is the non sequitur.

English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.

To make the bloody thing talk the way I do when I'm on a verbal roll, in my idioms and rhythms.

I am not a sound bite person. I prefer to run at the mouth.

Regan’s greatness as a rhetorician was in his delivery not in the content of what he said as with Churchill and Roosevelt.

Choose each word as a precision tool. Consider how it sounds, not how it reads.

Sen. McCain isn't someone who strikes you as a particularly dynamic speaker. He doesn't seem to like the formality of giving speeches. He clearly isn't too comfortable reading off a TelePrompter.

I'm an over-communicator a lot of the time.

I can't decide which way I talk. I really, honestly can't.

Women are more complicated communicators than men, who have a tendency to pronounce and bloviate, and that makes for better writing in talky work.

Political confusion starts with terminology confusion.

I am aware that somewhere along the line, I've subconsciously turned down the pitch of my speech, like a silencer of a gun that softens the sound of its firing. Now, even when I yell, I don't feel like I am using my full voice.

He pronounced some of his words as if they were corks being drawn out of bottles.

Women can always put things in fewest words. Except when it's blowing up; and then they lengthens it out.

He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts. He selects that language which will convey his ideas in the most explicit and direct manner.

I wish to God,” said Gideon with mild exasperation, “that you’d talk—just once—in prose like other people.

Pronunciation has made many an innocent word sound like a doctor's orders for a stomach pump.

Donald Trump has been saying that I think for as long as I've been listening to him of late, and that's what he's going to do.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

I like how I write better than how I speak.

These days I just can't seem to say what I mean [...]. I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her.

My grandmother was an English teacher for a while. And she stressed to me the importance of reading, being able to articulate well.