The sounds and rhythms of words are really important to me.
I do love perusing the dictionary to find how many words I don't use - words that have specific, sharp, focused meaning. I also love the sound of certain words. I love the sound of the word pom-pom.
I loved the sound of the words, even if I was not entirely sure what all of them meant.
I like to play with words and the sounds of words - that's extremely important to me.
Meanings are translatable. Words are untranslatable… More briefly – a word is translatable, its sound is not.
Somewhere along the line the rhythms and tonalities of music elided in my brain with the sounds that words make and the rhythm that sentences have.
In writing, you discover interior sonorities in words. Dipthongs sound differently beneath the pen. One hears them with their sounds divorced.
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
Logic is to grammar what the sense of words is to their sound.
What beauty there is in words; what a lurking curious charm in the sound some words.
I don't listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.
In a certain way, it's the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.
Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.
I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue. But when I'm writing, the way the words sound is as important to me as what they mean.
But to me the actual sound of the words is all important; I feel always that the words complete the music and must never be swallowed up in it.
