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.
As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become.
In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.
A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?
Isn't it funny the way some combinations of words can give you--almost apart from their meaning--a thrill like music?
Every word has its fragrance: there is a harmony and a disharmony of fragrances, and hence of words.
It took me years to understand that words are often as important as experience, because words make experience last.
I just think lots of words have physicality. How about the word 'wobble?' You think that's arbitrary? When you say the word 'wince,' you wince. How about that?
Almost all words do have color, and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone's eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her, too.
A word into the silence thrown always finds its echo somewhere where silence opens hidden lexicons.
In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.
The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
The juxtaposition of words - the color, feeling, and sound of the words together - has as much to do with the story as the narrative itself does.
There's something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives. It's computer mysticism. Words that are computer generated to be used on products that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark - words devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve, the words acquires a chantlike quality.
We are so used to releasing words, we don't know what to do with them if they stay. No matter how many times we let them go, they come back. The words that matter always stay.
