Joss Whedon Quotes

I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register. It's the old you-gotta-paint-like-them-before-you-can-paint-like-you thing.

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

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

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

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

I have always loved story - I escaped within it as a child, I read every day, I love figuring out the complex layers of an author's work.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

I love taking on other people's words. They are much more interesting to me than my own.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.

I often say poetry was my first love.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

One of your jobs as a speechwriter is to transform the bureaucratic into the poetic.

I am not sure that I can make the epigrams that you are hunting for. The truth is you have a pretty old horse to run and you’ve got to take me as I am.

Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

There was a period in my life when I was very young that I wrote a sonnet a day just to learn concision in writing.