Everyday Speech Quotes

My style is colloquial storytelling. It's the way we tell stories to one another - it's not writerly, it's not overdone.

In my day-to-day, I might speak, like, 10 sentences.

Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps.

If you use a colloquialism or a slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better.

I write in quite a simple way because that's just the way I write. The vocab I use is quite wee. That's just the way I talk.

My songs have some street talk in them, but that's the way I talk and the way a lot of people I know talk.

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred.

Severe isn't a word normally associated with a cold. Severe is for weather or third-degree burns...No one responds 'severe' when someone asks how her cold is.In fact, nine out of ten Americans respond to 'How's your cold' with 'It sucks.' So there should be an It Sucks cold formula.

I'm over the word 'like' in conversation, and 'you know' seems to be the placeholder of choice, but when I'm writing dialogue, I tend to use those phrases because that's how people talk.

I'm very anxious not to fall into archaism or 'literary' diction. I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but the words must be alive.

The public talk colloquially, the public's grammar's not perfect. They kid around and I don't think they overly mark me down for that. They just see me as a normal guy.

I don't particularly care about having [my characters] talk realistically, that doesn't mean very much to me. Actually, a lot of people speak more articulately than some critics think, but before the 20th century it really didn't occur to many writers that their language had to be the language of everyday speech. When Wordsworth first considered that in poetry, it was considered very much of a shocker. And although I'm delighted to have things in ordinary speech, it's not what I'm trying to perform myself at all: I want my characters to get their ideas across, and I want them to be articulate.

Yeah, well, the F-bomb - it's become as ubiquitous as the word 'like.' People just throw the word 'like' around as punctuation. And I think in a lot of everyday speech, the F-bomb has become a kind of dash or a comma.

The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

Garbage. It's a natural quality of huskiness in the midrange of my voice that I call 'garbage.' It's not a clear-toned announcer's voice. It's more like the voice of the guy next door.

Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

I like to write in fairly everyday language - I've always tried to write lyrics that, if people would speak the words, it wouldn't sound like a song.

The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.

I have tons of stuff that, you know, seems like it's a well-constructed sentence but it is not how people talk, it's how people write. So that's why I think it's sometimes easier for me to write for actors 'cause I know what's frustrating about, you know, sentences that come out just perfect. Well, who talks like that? And who of us don't overlap each other? Except on the radio, hopefully.

I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.