Naomi Alderman Quotes

I'm not trying to stump anybody... it's the beauty of the language that I'm interested in.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

The Americans are very clear, and obsessed with nouns.

The way that words fit together is always interesting to me. I love words.

The proper words in the proper places are the true definition of style.

'Words, Words, Words' was very much its title. It's just words, words, words and trying to show that I can pack as much material into an hour as I possibly could word count-wise.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

I am a writer of fragments.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing - playing with language and getting just the right metaphor.

I enjoy finding the right word and giving each its full measure, its full space in a sentence.

It is okay to experiment with language. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf experimented with writing, but basically, one must have a familiarity with the language. And to have that, one must respect it.

Nothing feels better than constructing a beautiful sentence.

I love the English language, the colors of it, the many, many nuances, the different influences. I find German stilted, in a way, by comparison.

Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty.

I'm really focused and obsessed with writing things that are specific. I don't like big rock lyrics - I find them infuriating.

I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.

For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.

I, like many annoying pedants, will wince when someone says 'less' when they should have said 'fewer.' But my 'poor' sounds like poo-ah, not pore; and my 'grass' rhymes with mass, not farce. What's wrong with that?

Names and other proper nouns shouldn't distract from the language.

I love writing prose. I really love writing prose. It's very pleasurable for me.

When the public doesn't understand me, it's a battle. So when I choose words, I choose them for their musicality, rhythm, and sense, and I choose the right dialect to express that.

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.