Alfred North Whitehead Quotes

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.

I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.

While the spoken word can travel faster, you can't take it home in your hand. Only the written word can be absorbed wholly at the convenience of the reader.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.

Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks.

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.

I learned to write by listening to people talk. I still feel that the best of my writing comes from having heard rather than having read.

The greater amount of truth is impulsively uttered; thus the greater amount is spoken, not written.

I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It's more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.

God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.

Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.

I've always believed the words that came out of my mouth were most comfortable when I'd written them.

After my recent brush with voicelessness, I thought I'd share with you a few thoughts about speech. Don't take it lightly my friends. If music is the pathway to the heart as Voltaire suggested, then speech is the pathway to other people. Live in silence and you live alone.

As fascinated as I was by words on paper, it was matched by my fascination with words in people's mouths. The spoken word. And that is the world of theatre.

He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone.

I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read.

There is a form of literature that is a deed, and a form that is only talk, and the latter passes away like a conversation.

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears.

Reading aloud sounds like a good idea, but honestly, it doesn't work very well. Good dialogue in a book doesn't actually bear much resemblance to real-life dialogue. For example, if you've ever seen a word-for-word transcript of people talking, it doesn't read off the page very well. The trick is to make it *seem* like it's being spoken, not to make it speakable.

The tongue of man is a twisty thing, there are plenty of words there of every kind.