Language Patterns Quotes

We converse as we live by repeating, by combining and recombining a few elements over and over again just as nature does when of elementary particles it builds a world.

Men's language is as their lives.

I overuse words. My kids catch me saying stuff. They're like, 'Hey, you say that all the time.' 'Boom' is one of those things.

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.

My delight in things is definitely Caribbean. It has to do with landscape and food. The fact that my language may have a metrical direction is because that's the shape of the language. I didn't make that shape.

I'm obsessed with how people talk! Accents, dialects... So whenever I go someplace where an accent is extremely distinct - Minneapolis, New Orleans, Jamaica, Vancouver - I always find myself trying to pick up the subtleties of their patterns.

St. Louis is a very interesting city in terms of accents.

Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.

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 suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

If you talk to your friends the way your parents talk, they will think you are stiff and odd.

Japanese people have a funny habit of abbreviating names.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is 'naive' spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of 'bonsai.'

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

I say 'as it were' or 'so to speak' too often because puns and double entendres keep insinuating themselves into my consciousness as I'm talking.

I have been told I say 'shucks' quite frequently... Shucks, I'll have to work on that.

Women, tend to talk more than men, and they do this thing where they say things that can easily be shown. Like, they don't need to do that.

I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?'

I'm interested in why people talk like they do. Like Boston Irish. It's so laid back. Why is that?

If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.

The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language.

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

People talk in ungrammatical, unwriterly ways.

What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.

Have you ever noticed that when people use the expression 'I have to say', what follows usually needn't be said?