Use Of Language Quotes

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  Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Powerful, Reading, Communication

  Speech, 14 Feb. 1923, in The Times 15 Feb. 1923

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• Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

  C. S. Lewis

  Communication, Writing, Mean

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• Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

  Noam Chomsky

  Language Words, Law, Generations

  Noam Chomsky (2003). “For Reasons Of State”, p.402, Penguin Books India

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• Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.

  Kenneth Burke

  Mean, Essentials, Use

  Kenneth Burke (1969). “A Rhetoric of Motives”, p.43, Univ of California Press

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• RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

  Ben Marcus

  Wise, Art, Pain

  Ben Marcus (2013). “The Age of Wire and String”, p.92, Granta Books

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• Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

  John Milius

  Drama, Writing, Skills

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• About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Stupid, Axes, Trying

  Edsger W. Dijkstra (2012). “Selected Writings on Computing: A personal Perspective”, p.130, Springer Science & Business Media

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• I write in order to understand the images. Being what my agent . . . somewhat ruefully calls a language playwright, is problematic because in production, you have to make the language lift off the page. But a good actor can turn it into human speech. I err sometimes toward having such a compound of images that if an actor lands heavily on each one, you never pull through to a larger idea. That's a problem for the audience. But I come to playwriting from the visual world - I used to be a painter. I also really love novels and that use of language. But it's tricky to ask that of the theatre.

  Ellen McLaughlin

  Writing, Order, Land

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• The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

  Donna Tartt

  Book, Character, Long

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• I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out.

  Terry Brooks

  Thinking, Use, Language

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• It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

  Edward Sapir

  Communication, Mean, Reflection

  Edward Sapir, David Goodman Mandelbaum (1985). “Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality”, p.162, Univ of California Press

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• Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

  Huston Smith

  Teacher, Real, Special

  Huston Smith (2003). “The Way Things Are: Conversations with Huston Smith on the Spiritual Life”, p.196, Univ of California Press

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• Tobias Buckell combines old world with new in his novel CRYSTAL RAIN. While the rich cultures, drawn in part from Caribbean history and lore, echo a familiar landscape, he brings it out of the Earth milieu and into a bold new universe where technology and tradition collide. I enjoyed his colorful characters and musical use of language; his voice is fresh and entirely readable.

  Karin Lowachee

  Rain, Character, Technology

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• I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose.

  Sol Stein

  Book, Writing, Tired

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• The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Writing, Silence, Use

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• The complete novelist would come into the world with a catalog of qualities like this. He would own the concentration of a Trappist monk, the organizational ability of a Prussian field marshal, the insight into human relations of a Viennese psychologist, the discipline of a man who prints the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, the exquisite sense of timing of an Olympic gymnast, and by the way, a natural instinct and flair for exceptional use of language.

  Leon Uris

  Prayer, Men, Discipline

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• And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

  Andrew Clements

  Clever, Giving, Musical

  Andrew Clements (2008). “Things Hoped For”, p.77, Penguin

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• In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

  Robert Morgan

  Book, Home, Use

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• For a generation that gets most of its information off a computer screen (be it Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter or what have you), an athlete has to be very careful about the public/private aspect of that. Be careful not to be overly critical, be careful with use of language, and understand the whole world is watching.

  Leigh Steinberg

  Athlete, Generations, Use

  Source: bleacherreport.com

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• The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

  Eudora Welty

  Lying, Use, Language

  Eudora Welty (2011). “On Writing”, p.63, Modern Library

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• Rick Black writes with the honed elegance of a poet so in command of lyric sentiment and the efficient evocative use of language that what results is indeed as urgent and vulnerable as true prayer ... There is something profoundly human and completely necessary about Star of David.

  Kwame Dawes

  Stars, Prayer, Writing

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• There is a narrow class of uses of language where you intend to communicate. Communication refers to an effort to get people to understand what one means. And that, certainly, is one use of language and a social use of it. But I don't think it is the only social use of language. Nor are social uses the only uses of language.

  Noam Chomsky

  Communication, Mean, Thinking

  Source: chomsky.info

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• If Woody Guthrie set the bar for American songwriters, Bob Dylan jumped right over it. No one I know will ever come close to possessing the beauty of melody and the use of language that Dylan shares with us, with ease.

  John Mellencamp

  Bars, Use, Ease

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• I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Writing, Character, Exercise

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