Language Art Quotes

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

I like words. I like the way they clash around together and bang up against each other, especially in songs.

Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud.

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.

I like to play with words and the sounds of words - that's extremely important to me.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

That complete statement which is literature.

but paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.

I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I’ll still be questing after just that right combination of words.

I think the thing I really got from Ginsberg was that you can tell a story through kind of painting pictures with words. And when I found out that you could have a profession doing that, it was thrilling to me. It just became my passion immediately, playing with words and poetry.

The poetry of speech.

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

I love to write poetry.

Greek is doubtless the most perfect [language] that has been contrived by the art of man.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

There is such an animal as a nonstylist, only they're not writers - they're typists.

Literature is the stringing together of pictures in words.

The temple of art is built in words.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I always thought of words as art supplies.

I just don't think people get off on language anymore. Language used to be an elevated art. It used to be for people what music can be. But people don't learn to do that anymore, so eloquence is merely a matter of waste. Who needs a good vocabulary and proper English? Eloquence - it's dead and who needs it?

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.