linguistic style Quotes

Oh, by the way, I tend to use a lot of profanities. I do that for a reason: I like it.

The one thing that no Anglo-Saxon can stand is to be ruled by someone who 'talks fancy' by using Latinate words too often.

Nor use too swelling, or ill-sounded words . . . .

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound.

He pronounced some of his words as if they were corks being drawn out of bottles.

I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.

In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

I love being verbal in films.

My style in Italian is very old-style.

Sometimes you can just hear the actor in the language.

I do like to turn a phrase, but it's all about how you turn it.

I pay a lot of attention to whitespace. I pay a lot of attention to the rhythm of words together.

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

Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

I prefer the word aviatrix. It has more zing to it." "It's very zingy," I agreed.

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

In India nearly everybody spoke metaphorically except the English who spoke bluntly and could make their most transparent lies look honest as a consequence; whereas any truth contained in these metaphorical rigmaroles was so deviously presented that it looked devious itself.

I think that when you're writing plays, and I think it's also true with novels, it helps to have an ear for the music of language, for what we call poetry, for the sound effects and the way that the sound can produce sensual feeling at odds with or consonant with the content of the work. Your work is also gorgeous writing. It's very unfortunate when you open a novel that everybody's loving and it's just, you know, an excruciatingly bad sentence.

I’m a word freak. I like words. I’ve always compared writing to music. That’s the way I feel about good paragraphs. When it really works, it’s like music.

Why do all your friends talk like books?