Language Quality Quotes

There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.

When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have a plot, really, what shall you rely on? Just language. And sometimes I am so afraid of writing the wrong thing, I just sit and wait for the right thing to come.

We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language.

The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer.

My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.

In general, every country has the language it deserves.

If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.

In many ways, it's easier to write a book. You have more latitude with structure, and you have the freedom to luxuriate within the internal lives and musings of your characters. But where a screenplay does not always demand great prose, a novel lives or dies by it.

The fight against bad English is not frivolous.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy.

Wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too.

Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.

Broadsheets can be scathing. But I have respect for broadsheet journalists because they haven't succumbed to degrading themselves, to writing pidgin English with all these terrible colloquialisms, the phrasing of which is just, like, embarrassing.

The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.

Stop worrying about the 'dumbing down' of our language by bloggers, tweeters, cableheads and MSM thumbsuckers engaged in a 'race to the bottom' of the page by little minds confined to little words.

Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America.

You start realizing that good prose is crunchy. There's texture in your mouth as you say it. You realize bad writing, bland writing, has no texture, no taste, no corners in your mouth. I'm a great believer in reading aloud.

Language is like music; we rejoice in beauty, range, and quality in both, and we are demeaned by the repetition of a few sour notes.

Television became defensible - and, frankly, worshipped - because the shows started to be so carefully structured, so attentive to language, and so visually interesting that they suddenly caught people's eye.

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.

Both the quantity and quality of the words children hear during their first three years of life make an enormous difference in how prepared they are to start school, and ultimately, their long-term achievement.

Let's stop reflexively comparing Chinese writers to Chinese writers, Indian writers to Indian writers, black writers to black writers. Let's focus on the writing itself: the characters, the language, the narrative style.