Linguistic Fluency Quotes

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.

We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.

Anyone should be very suspicious of a sentence he's written that can't be read aloud easily.

Those who write as they speak, even though they speak well, write badly.

It has been said that good prose should resemble the conversation of a well-bred man.

I speak English my way, but people understand it. You can understand everything I say, and that's the most important thing.

Well, I'm trilingual myself. I am, I know how to speak Spanish, English, obviously, and I speak pretty good Ebonics.

To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul. German is such a language. Once you have it in your head, you can go there anytime, you can close the door, you have a refuge.

My most interesting correspondence is with my translators. I marvel at their sensitivity over certain passages that just anyone, even if he knows German well, would not appreciate.

The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.

The more fluent the experience of reading a quote - or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind--the less likely we are to question the actual quotation.

The devil take these people and their language! They take a dozen monosyllabic words in their jaws, chew them, crunch them and spit them out again, and call that speaking. Fortunately they are by nature fairly silent, and although they gaze at us open-mouthed, they spare us long conversations.

I type a 101 words a minute. But it's in my own language.

Also, I think having a musicality about me that helps in identifying different things in languages and getting them right.

I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.

I speak Hebrew excellently.

Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

I like how I write better than how I speak.

To have a specific style is to be poor in speech.

A fluent writer always seems more talented than he is. To write well, one needs a natural felicity and an acquired difficulty.

I have sung in over 20 different languages and enjoyed it. I have even sung in foreign languages like Spanish and Russian.

I dreamed I spoke in another's language, I dreamed I lived in another's skin, I dreamed I was my own beloved, I dreamed I was a tiger's kin. I dreamed that Eden lived inside me, And when I breathed a garden came, I dreamed I knew all of Creation, I dreamed I knew the Creator's name. I dreamed--and this dream was the finest-- That all I dreamed was real and true, And we would live in joy forever, You in me, and me in you.