David Crystal Quotes

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

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that 'fetch' is now the word I want to use to mean 'cool.'

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'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.

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, "It's better this way." But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.

The world needs more Edwin Morgans, people who can take the language and swing it round their heads and don't care what you think.

I think what's fun about the fairytales is just seeing what everybody interprets them as, which comes from the different directors and what they want to do with them.

There is nothing finer in the world than the telling of tales. Split atoms if you wish, but splitting an infinitive-and getting away with it-is far nobler. Lance boils if you wish, but pricking pretensions is often cleaner and always more fun.

Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.

Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.

Genius is answerable only to itself; it is the sole judge of the means, since it alone knows the end; thus genius must consider itself as above the law, for it is the task of genius to remake the law; moreover the man who frees himself from his time and place may take everything, hazard everything, for everything is his by right.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

I'd always wanted to do a weekly strip, or a strip that was in installments like that. It's been fun trying to figure out how to make that work. Their standards are so prissy that they won't allow me to use all kinds of language. Not only can you not swear, this morning I was informed I couldn't use the word "schmuck." I couldn't use "crap," "schmuck," or "get laid." Those three were beyond the pale. But you get around that, and it comes out better. I can't quite explain why.

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

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

... maybe that's all anyone who writes or paints or sculpts is doing anyway -- excusing themselves for refusing to live like other people or be like them.

There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away.

In school, writing was the only thing that really came naturally to me, but it wasn't until college that I realized that I could do it for more than just fun.

I've been acting since I was young because I wanted to, not because my parents wanted me to. My dad is a principal and mom is a middle school counselor, so acting was like, "Eh, whatever. As long as you get good grades." It's really fun, and nothing more.

As a producer, I really get to tell stories that I care about in a way that I want to. I get to shape them. I get to choose the collaborators. That's really gratifying as a storyteller. And also, frankly, it's really fun to create jobs for other people.

This is a fantasy fiddle tune. The part you fantasize is the fiddle.

You should have fun when you're acting. That's when magic happens.