I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.
Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.
We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.
Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily.
Those who write as they speak, even though they speak well, write badly.
It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.
I speak English my way, but people understand it. You can understand everything I say, and that's the most important thing.
Well, I'm trilingual myself. I am, I know how to speak Spanish, English, obviously, and I speak pretty good Ebonics.
To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge.
My most interesting correspondence is with my translators. I marvel at their sensitivity over certain passages that just anyone, even if he knows German well, would not appreciate.
The more fluent the experience of reading a quote - or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind--the less likely we are to question the actual quotation.
The devil take these people and their language! They take a dozen monosyllabic words in their jaws, chew them, crunch them and spit them out again, and call that speaking. Fortunately they are by nature fairly silent, and although they gaze at us open-mouthed, they spare us long conversations.
Also, I think having a musicality about me that helps in identifying different things in languages and getting them right.
I type a 101 words a minute. But it's in my own language.
The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.
I speak Hebrew excellently.
I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.
An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art. The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love.
To have a specific style is to be poor in speech.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.
Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.
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.
I like how I write better than how I speak.
A fluent writer always seems more talented than he is. To write well, one needs a natural felicity and an acquired difficulty.
