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

All words are possible, then, all names. They rain down, all these words, they disintegrate into a powdery avalanche. Belched from the volcano's mouth, they spurt into the sky, then fall again. In the...

How could an alphabet - letters that didn't even mean anything by themselves - be important?

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

That tingle in the brain is called a word. It bats itself against its fleshy bounds.

If a man is highly sexed he's virile. If a woman is, she's a nymphomaniac. With them it's power but with us it's a disease! Even the act of sex is called penetration! Why don't they call it enclosure?

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:...

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language

Words are the clothes thoughts wear.

What's in a name, anyway? That which we call a nose by any other name would still smell.

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

If a person who constantly reads is labeled a bookworm, then I was quickly becoming a tapeworm.

Probably is a word with an emergency ejector seat.

At first I thought common nouns were hardest hit, coffee and doorway and so on, but it soon became clear that the missing were mostly adjectives.

Books and words not only began to have some meaning, but they meant everything.

Names are strange and special gifts. There are names you give to yourself and names you show to the world, names that stay for a short while and names that remain with you forever, names that come...

How could he possibly explain himself to these people? They wanted to learn English for show - off social reasons, or to be able to read Aldous Huxley in the original. Whereas he had learned German...

I suggested, further, that the following might be sculpted: a large box filled with sixty moonshine jugs - - piled high, toppling over, corks popping, liquor flowing. Disorder to match the clutter and...

Watering down the currency of expression, causing anything to mean whatever you want it to mean, until nothing is meant and nothing is precise.