George Saintsbury Quotes

I love English, though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power.

As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.

Will America be the death of English? I'm glad I asked me that. My well-thought-out mature judgment is that it will.

I don't think I've ever had a mentor. The closest thing is my friend Christopher Fowler, another writer. Chris kept me sane for a long time before I made it.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.

Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time.

I want to create a body of work that is entertaining and speaks to people for a long time. Longer than my life span.

I'd read Up in the Old Hotel, and I wanted to do something with Mitchell's stuff for a long time.

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.

It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

There are major advantages to remaining out of the radio for a long time before we have something that crosses into the mainstream properly.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.

When we look at the specific effect of the Internet on language, languages asking the question, 'Has English become a different language as a result of the Internet?' the answer has to be no.

Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before.

Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.

Toni Morrison was a big influence on my work since I was a teenager, what she did with English. I joke that I think she speaks 20 Englishes simultaneously, that she knows how to do that.

Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.

Shakespeare is undoubtedly the greatest dramatist the world has known, and 95 countries translate his work into their languages.

Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.