Language Pleasure Quotes

He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.

Languages are fluffy big pillows stuffed between nations - what others say is muffled and nearly lost in them, and when we speak their grammar we get feathers in our mouth. It's worth it. What pleasure to phrase an idea, even in child's words, slowly, and sail it across the gulf in another language to a different-speaking human being!

Words. I had always loved them. I collected them, like I had collected pretty stones as a child. I liked to roll words over my tongue like a lump of molten honeycomb, savouring the sweetness, the crackle, the crunch.

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).

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Sometimes, when something really great happens to me, I like to wait two weeks before I tell anyone about it, because I like to use the word 'fortnight'.

Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?

I love the exhilaration of feeling a pull quote come out of your mouth. The words just taste better.

I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.