Oral Expression Quotes

I always read what I write out loud, and I did that long before any radio thing. My editor finds that unusual.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but the tongue is mightier than them both put together.

Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily.

I cannot keep from talking, even at the risk of being instructive.

I think there is an enormous diference between speaking and writing. One rereads what one writes. But one might read it slowly or quickly. In other words, you do not know how long you will have to spend deliberating over a sentence. ... But if I listen to a tape recorder, the listening time is determined by the speed at which the tape turns and not by my own needs.

Teachers have always said my only strength is talking and that I talk very fast.

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

From a psychoanalytical point of view, we start discovering the world through our mouths in the very first stage of our lives, when we're just born.

I enjoy watching a woman with really bad teeth and a good sense of humor struggling to use her lips and tongue to hide her teeth when she's laughing. I just stand there and tell her joke after joke after joke.

Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.

Butler compared the tongues of these eternal talkers to race-horses, which go the faster the less weight they carry.

I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read.

Speech is the small change of silence.

The tongue of man is a twisty thing.

I understand Spanish better than I speak it.

The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

I'm a very good thinker, but I sometimes grab the wrong word. I say something I didn't think through adequately. I mean, I don't type my speeches, then sit up there and read them off the teleprompter, you know. I wing it.

There's something, I think, that gets lost when we write something - something gets lost in the translation. So I speak everything out, and it's more important how it sounds. And applying that to more formal aspects of writing.

I drank some boiling water because I wanted to whistle.

I'm against people reading statements. When you read statement, I automatically take it as though you can't talk, and it's not real.

You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.

Everyone I know has a predilection for sharing words.

I really don't care that much about "Beauties." What I really like are Talkers. To me, good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love. The word itself shows why I like Talkers better than Beauties, why I tape more than I film. It's not "talkies." Talkers are doing something.

I find that if you just talk, your mouth comes up with stuff.