Linguistic Skill Quotes

The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies.

On the day of the show, I sit down with someone that speaks very good English and someone who speaks the local language very well and work out what I'm going to say.

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

To money, the finest linguist in the world!

I definitely have a gift for language that is rhythmic and attractive to the ear, and I have interesting [verbal] imagery which I guess is a poetic touch.

He can thread a needle with a well-turned phrase.

French is a foreign language, but I've been speaking it since I was 18 so it's second nature to me.

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.

A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence.

Since I learned English, I've become a motormouth!

I'm terrible at languages. I'm trying to learn Spanish. I tried to learn French as a kid.

Word-carpentry is like any other kind of carpentry: you must join your sentences smoothly.

When I'm doing an accent, you shouldn't notice it for a while, if I'm doing it right.

I had the advantage, that I know Swedish. So I had the Swedish book and I had a lot of English translations, and German translations, and I did everything to make the best English translation of August Strindberg's Miss Julie I could. And then, there I went. "Oh! I think she's thinking this, but I think she should say it!" And so on. It's wonderful to do that.

Fluency in even one other language would be fantastic.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement.

It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

I speak some dwarvish.

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

I can speak a little Italian.

So writing stories is not easier in comparison to the playwriting or translation; the stories are easier in league with them.

If you can not master your language you must be it's slave.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.