Language Creativity Quotes

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Now the point of comedy is not just looking funny, it's use of language. We have at our disposal a great language... and the imaginative, creative use of that language can be at the service of humour.

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

I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.

As I have said before, I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters, and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling-book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.

English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.

Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.

'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'

The American language should be descriptive rather than proscriptive.

Somebody once said that the Irish derived the greatest benefit from the English language. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter, they fling it at the sky like paint pots full of rainbow colors.

Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world.

I like playing around with the words; I love it when I feel like I've picked the exact right word to describe whatever it is I'm trying to describe.

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

I guess I have a weird habit of writing body part metaphors.

Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.

The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

You've got to find a difierent approach. You've got to create some interest in your language, in the words and pictures you create. If a candidate can't give a 10-minute speech and have reporters reaching for their pens in the first 90 seconds, he probably shouldn't be running.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally.

When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.

[I'm]a freak user of words, not a poet.

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.