Clifford Geertz Quotes

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

Writing is a communication.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

I'm tired of wasting letters when punctuation will do, period.

Words are so lovable. How could you not love words?

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it.

I was born into a profession in which my love of words, chosen with care for their meaning and nuance, was extremely important, not only to me, but also to the people with whom I worked with.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

I know a lot about words. I get paid to write stories, so I get to talk with people about the meaning behind words all day.

Writing can be fun. I think the challenge is to convey interesting things in accessible ways, and that's what I aim to do in books.

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.

No matter how wonderful the story, it has to move on something, and that is language. The words that I use, the pace, the rhythm and cadences all need to be there. If they're not there, the story is like a boat that just sits there and doesn't move on the ocean.

The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life.

These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They're the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

Language is a nice way to remember things.

Reading taught me how to write.

But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style.