I am by nature a dealer in words, and words are the most powerful drug known to humanity.
I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we have to learn how to talk to one another. Poetry is the language at its essence. It’s the bones and the skeleton of the language. It teaches you, if nothing else, how to choose your words.
The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.
Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.
The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.
The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
Literature exists inside the language. It's made of words. It's not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words. In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.
There is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor's almost imperceptible touch.
....Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.
Invented languages have often been created in tandem with entire invented universes, and most conlangers come to their craft by way of fantasy and science fiction.
Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.
I'd always admired writers. I'd always loved words on a page. Somehow, words seemed to bypass image and get straight to the heart of things. Somehow, words seemed big enough to contain pain, and sentences could pull broken bits together.
The poetry of speech.
Greek is doubtless the most perfect [language] that has been contrived by the art of man.
There's no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There's no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.
A man who is careful with his palate is not likely to be careless with his paragraphs.
Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.
I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. It is a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love.
I always thought of words as art supplies.
It's a writer's job to carve with language, to hew close to the bone.
I just don't think people get off on language anymore. Language used to be an elevated art. It used to be for people what music can be. But people don't learn to do that anymore, so eloquence is merely a matter of waste. Who needs a good vocabulary and proper English? Eloquence - it's dead and who needs it?
Playing with words is like combining different notes in music.
