Linguistic Experimentation Quotes

Walt Whitman, he who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary.

I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.

In effect we are, bending and breaking the rules of the language. And if someone were to ask why we do it, the answer is simply: for fun

I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

Sometimes it's like that. I go, 'You know what? I'm going to just change scales. I'm going to even change instruments. And I'm going to go into the chromatics of the Spanish language,' and I do. You know, the poem is totally different. It's like a lunar voice versus a day voice, a solar voice.

When I was little, seven or eight years old, in third and fourth grade, I would always try to use long words and stuff.

So a lot of what you see in the Baroque Cycle is me wanting to be one of those guys. In the case of Anathem, I needed something that was more formal, less flashy, as if it had been translated from the classical language of another planet, but enlivened with slang terms that a teenage narrator would enjoy throwing around.

I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.

As a writer, I play with words all day long. I toy with them, listen for their overtones, crack them open, and try to stuff my thoughts inside.

The benefits of becoming fluent in a foreign tongue are as underestimated as the difficulty is overestimated. Thousands of theoretical linguists will disagree, but I know from research and personal experimentation with more than a dozen languages that (1) adults can learn languages much faster than children when constant 9-5 work is removed and that (2) it is possible to become conversationally fluent in any language in six months or less. At four hours per day, six months can be whittled down to less than three months.

A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.

Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award.

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

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

I'm more of a wordsmith, so I like taking different words and trying to see what I can do with them - as many things as possible.

You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

Sometimes I talk to myself in languages I'm unfamiliar with... just to screw with my subconscious.