Christopher Hitchens Quotes

The words I overuse are all adverbs.

I hardly use cuss words.

I go through phases where I'll overuse words. S.E. Hinton, who wrote The Outsiders - she and I have been in contact for the 50th anniversary of the book - and she said, "You still owe me the 10 dollars that we bet that you couldn't stop saying the word 'gnarly.'"

I'm not very good with words, weirdly.

Some people read. I like to put words together.

I don't read articles about myself. I try to distance myself from it. Reading about yourself is nice, but in the long run, it doesn't help. Concentration has to be in the right place.

I grew up with a love of words.

There was a time in my life when I used the word 'crap' regularly and unthinkingly.

I have always, always loved words.

Just because I have a good vocabulary, I don't think of myself as anachronistic - just because I try not to use the word 'like' every other word.

I'm a real big fan of words.

Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty.

Before you use a fancy word, make room for it.

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.

This is why it is sometimes hard for introverts to find words: we really hate to compromise, and words are always a compromise.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

Every time I end a book, I look down at myself.

Reading recent history is good to humble yourself, and also to feel some hopefulness that there is progress.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.

If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affect you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you; and then show your copy to whom you please.

Those words are from Lynda Barry's novel 'Cruddy.' I've carried them with me for some time. There's a lot in my life I wasn't expecting. One is the realization that I stood at this pulpit and delivered a reading for my own graduation...15 years ago. Unexpectedly, I'm old.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

People who are busy doing things - as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.