Speech is one of the marvels that characterize man, and also one of the most difficult spontaneous creations that have been accomplished by nature.
Speech is what makes man a political being.
Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.
When we, as humans, articulate, our tongues tend to hit the back of the teeth.
Every word we speak calls on 37 muscles and thousands of nerves. It's not surprising that sometimes these nerves and muscles fail us.
Corporations have free speech, but they can't speak like you and me. They don't have mouths or hands.
I love how humans talk.
Speech is reason's brother, and a kingly prerogative of man.
[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.
Speech is a very important aspect of being human. A whisper doesn't cut it.
The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?
Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.
I write in order to understand the images. Being what my agent . . . somewhat ruefully calls a language playwright, is problematic because in production, you have to make the language lift off the page. But a good actor can turn it into human speech. I err sometimes toward having such a compound of images that if an actor lands heavily on each one, you never pull through to a larger idea. That's a problem for the audience. But I come to playwriting from the visual world - I used to be a painter. I also really love novels and that use of language. But it's tricky to ask that of the theatre.
I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses.
My music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. That is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thought and feeling must, without exaggeration or violence, become true, accurate music.
