Aldous Huxley Quotes

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

I do like to turn a phrase, but it's all about how you turn it.

I use not casual phrases but imagistic phrases that create a rhythm of natural presence.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

I remember writing these terrible poems when I was, like, nine and discovered alliteration.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

I get just as much of a thrill out of constructing a good sentence that gets a laugh at the end as I do from a joke.

I like words. I like the way they clash around together and bang up against each other, especially in songs.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.

A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.

It's also crazy how Shakespeare has that cadence, and it's about locking into the jazz of the language, just like locking into the rhythm in N.W.A's lyrics.

I'm more of a wordsmith, so I like taking different words and trying to see what I can do with them - as many things as possible.

Assonance is not the enemy of rhyme. It helps us to respect rhyme, which has been spoiled by mechanical use.

You can say anything you want, yessir, but it's the words that sing, they soar and descend...I bow to them...I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down...I love words so much...The unexpected ones...The ones I wait for greedily or stalk until, suddenly, they drop.

In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.

The cure for mixed metaphors, I have always found, is for the patient to be obliged to draw a picture of the result.

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.

This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.