Orson Welles Quotes

Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'.

Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence.

What I'm really involved in when I'm writing is something that no one ever mentions when they see any play. Writing is like trying to make gunpowder out of chemicals. You have these words and sentences and the strange meanings and associations that are attached to the words and sentences, and you're somehow cooking these things all up so that they suddenly explode and have a powerful effect. That's what absorbs me from day to day in writing a play.

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!

Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.

A sentence is made up of words, a statement is made in words.... Statements are made, words or sentences are used.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.

It's everybody, I mean. Everything everybody does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

"Is," "is," "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

I would say recently I've gotten back to perusing [Samuel] Beckett's novels. Listening to the way Donald Trump speaks without saying anything has made me think about language.

From now on I will consider a language to be a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out ofa finite set of elements. All natural languages in their spoken or written form are languages in this sense.

The archenemy is the arch stupid!

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic.

I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

The only stupid thing about words is the spelling of them.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

I think communication starts when words are not present at all ... I think we put so much emphasis on language, actually silence is so much more important.

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

There is nothing that pleases me more than a beautiful sentence ... It is something that satisfies me.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.

Life is a B Movie: it's stupid and it's strange, it's a directionless story, the dialogue is lame, but in the 'he said she said' sometimes there's some poetry, if you turn your back long enough and let it happen naturally.