Anthony Burgess Quotes

The dictionary is, however, only a rough draft.

I bought a dictionary. First thing I did was, I looked up the word "dictionary", and it said "you're an asshole".

When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

I used to go through the dictionary looking for unusual but nontechnical words. At one time, I thought the greatest word was 'jejune' and I would throw it into every piece because something about it appealed to me.

I'm a massive fan of the dictionary.

I've been obsessed with words since I was a little girl, and I am fortunate that each week as resident word expert on 'Countdown' I am ideally placed to quiz my guests in dictionary corner about the words and phrases they use.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

Nonsense, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.

That's crazy, because I had no idea what the word 'contraction' meant before I saw it on the Internet.

It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters.

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

It's in the dictionary. And when I find what it is, I'll write it down in case it comes up again, I'll be certain to avoid it.

I never knew words could be so confusing," Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear. "Only when you use a lot to say a little," answered Tock. Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he'd heard all day.

There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.

When you work with words, words are your work.

'What's the use of their having names the Gnat said, 'if they won't answer to them?' 'No use to them,' said Alice; 'but it's useful to the people who name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?' 'I can't say,' the Gnat replied.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

I wish they would use English instead of Greek words. When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell me it is coloured by "chlorophyll," which at first sounds very instructive; but if they would only say plainly that a leaf is coloured green by a thing which is called "green leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got.

With the words, a lot of things start with questions. Some word kind of piques my interest, and I love the way it sounds, but I really don't know what it means. And I honestly don't care for a while.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.