Verbal Precision Quotes

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

On matters beyond his ken a gentleman speaks with caution. If names are not right, words are misused. When words are misused, affairs go wrong. When affairs go wrong, courtesy and music droop, law and justice fail. And when law and justice fail them, a people can move neither hand nor foot. So a gentleman must be ready to put names in speech, to put words into deeds. A gentleman is nowise careless of words.

I use language to pierce the brain. If I spoke like everybody else spoke, it would just dull everything.

To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.

I feel like you have to be so precise in what you are going to say, or you can be hammered if you say it the wrong way. That part makes feel bummed out because sometimes these things can take a while to figure out. Different people formulate things in different ways and have different processes. I feel like let's just take a deep breath and not be so perfectionistic about it all.

Language is a weapon, keep it honed!

Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.

The right word fitly spoken is a precious rarity.

Aaron Sorkin very sticky about using precise language. It's in his contract: you have to use what he writes!

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

When you use words loosely, without care and consideration, you erode trust in yourself and in what you're saying. When you squander words, you diminish your power.

Words, which are the dress of thoughts, deserve surely more care than clothes, which are only the dress of the person.

A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

Even the most honest writer lets slip a word too many when he wants to round off a period.

He is forever poised between a cliche and an indiscretion.

I think it's very important for the American president to mean what he says. That's why I understand that the enemy could misread what I say. That's why I try to be as clearly as I can.

The more words you have at your disposal, the more precisely you can express yourself.

Effective stream-of-consciousness narration is the product of verbal precision, not just of literal documentation. It is decidedly not a matter of unedited free-association.