Swearing is industry language. For as long as we're alive it's not going to change. You've got to be boisterous to get results.

When did the word 'compromise' get compromised? When did the negative connotations of 'He was caught in a compromising position' or 'She compromised her ethics' replace the positive connotations of...

Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities... much more so than music or language.

Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and...

I am made of words. When you cut me, I bleed sentences. When you read me, I speak to your soul.

There may be no English word as bent and broken by casual misuse, or drained of blood by idealizing admirers and apologists, or grossly caricatured by huckstering detractors, as church.

A woman who is praying and a woman who is having fun, they both say "Oh My God", the only difference is how they pronounce it.

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm {opposition}, there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict {the choice of one term against another}, and...

I never knew what language they'd lapse into when fucked – Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both {only the techies came in English}.

The creation of language is the creation of a fiction. The minute we speak we are in that fiction. It's a fiction designed, we hope, to reveal a truth. There is no "pure" language. The only "pure...

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else.

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

A metaphor is not merely a linguistic expression {a form of words} used for artistic or rhetorical purposes; instead, it is a process of human understanding by which we achieve meaningful experience...

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy,...

If we are the trees, words are our roots; and we grow as we write

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

Words, with their multiple meanings and nuances are like trees and oral communication like a forest. Trees are good for hiding, forest for losing the path. When one is trying to contemplate the...

There are words like 'orphan', 'widow' and 'widower' in all languages. But there is no word in any language to describe a parent who loses a child. How does one describe the pain of 'ultimate...

I've received two key pieces of advice in regard to my books. The first is, You should lay off the f - bombs. The other is, You should add more f - bombs.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra {this science has but one treatise:...

Words are the clothes thoughts wear.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

There is, I think, humor here which does not translate well from English into sanity.

Language gets very confusing as it approaches this place where outside and inside touch.

Words are immortal - Elinor

Probably is a word with an emergency ejector seat.