Language Exploration Quotes

And those moments that I find mind busting. Meaning like there's a word that I find in a weird place. I love the process of going to the writer and working that out, because that's just basic communication.

I love words, I think they're fascinating and incredibly wonderful things and part of the joy of my work is that I not only get to work with music but also with words. Sometimes it's a difficult process but a lot of the time it's really fun.

Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.

I loved the sound of the words, even if I was not entirely sure what all of them meant.

Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.

English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it

To find a new word that is accurate and different, you have to be alert for it.

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

If grammar is medicine, then Roy Clark gives us the spoonful of sugar to help it go down. A wonderful tour through the labyrinth of language.

One writes to find words' meanings.

No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.

Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

Sometimes I am a different character in different languages. I have different enjoyment from them. Sometimes different answers come out of me. Like, I didn't even know that about me. I get to know myself through different languages, actually.

Alphabet Juice is the book Roy Blount was born to write, which considering his prodigious talent, is saying a lot. Did you know that the word LAUGH is linguistically related to chickens and pie? This is the book that any of us who urgently, passionately love words-to read them, roll them over the tongue and learn their life stories while laughing and eating chicken and pie-were lucky enough to be born to read.

I write books because I have always been fascinated by stories and language, and because I love thinking about what makes people tick. Writing a story... 'The Giver' or any other... is simply an exploration of the nature of behavior: why people do what they do, how it affects others, how we change and grow, and what decisions we make along the way.

English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.

We have even done a weekend on Japanese grammar! Not that I know anything about Japanese grammar, but it was Kaz's idea, and it was a bit of an adventure, to say the least.

Writing is not an exercise in excision, it's a journey into sound.

A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory...dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.

In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.

What would make me happiest is if kids read these books [Bink & Gollie] and think: there is so much to love in the world; and words are so much fun.

Switching languages is a form of conversion. And like all conversions, whether it's judged a failure or a success, it excites the desire to leave, go elsewhere, adopt a new language and start all over again. It also means that a conscious effort is demanded to remain still.

I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.

After doing the Bengali 'Antar Mahal,' I felt I should work with all Indian languages.

If an offer comes my way, I would love to sing in every Indian language. It will be like an ode to my fans from every corner of the country.