Susie Dent Quotes

I went to UMass-Amherst and was like, 'I want to work in news, I want to be a journalist.' Then I got there and was like, 'what kind of crap is this?' They inflate everything. It will be like snowing outside, like just a little bit, and they are like 'Giant storm coming, batten down the hatches!' and I just didn't like that aspect of it.

Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.

Advertising has annihilated the power of the most powerful adjectives.

It is astonishing how much the word infinitely is misused: everything is infinitely more beautiful, infinitely better, etc. The concept must have something pleasing about it, or its misuse could not have become so general.

I admit that when the facts are not good enough, I always exaggerate them.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak.

You know what's the greatest part of anything ever in the history of everything? Exaggeration. No, wait; it's correcting yourself. No, better yet, it's making lists.

There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it

At the beginning there was the Word; at the end just the Cliche.

Everything is 'colossalized' - events, fortunes, accidents, climate, conversation, ambitions - everything is in the extreme ... They can't even have a tram run off a line, which in England or France might kill one or two people, without its making a holocaust of half a street full. ... The thing which surprises me is they should still employ animals of normal size; one would expect to see elephants and mammoths drawing the hansoms and carts!

I was raised by and have raised people who regard telling one story when two would do as a sign someone is not really trying.

Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

I tend to basically exaggerate in life, and in writing, it's fine to exaggerate. I really enjoy overstating for the purpose of getting a laugh. For another thing, writing is easier than digging ditches. Well, actually, that's an exaggeration. It isn't.

Language is an impure medium. Speech is public property and words are the soiled products, not of nature, but of society, which circulates and uses them for a thousand different ends.

Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually, to speak of? We live by exaggeration.

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts.

Maybe he overreacted a bit." - "A bit? That's like Hitler saying, 'Oooh, I just meant to go for a little walk, but then I accidentally invaded Poland".

Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his proper quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much.

The problem with words is that they easily lose their meaning. Say something often enough and it becomes a tic, not an expression of how you actually feel. Not only that, but words rarely change things. Actions do.

Oh, don't mind me! Just the queen of the heavens, dying over here!

Exaggeration is a prodigality of the judgment which shows the narrowness of one's knowledge or one's taste.

I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

Some persons are exaggerators by temperament. They do not mean untruth, but their feelings are strong, and their imaginations vivid, so that their statements are largely discounted by those of calm judgment and cooler temperament. They do not realize that we always weaken what we exaggerate.

They used to have a fish on the menu that was smoked, grilled and peppered They did everything to this fish but pistol-whip it and dress it in Bermuda shorts.