The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.
Cooking with your kids is a remarkable exercise to let them in on the purchasing part of the process - kids love to shop, and its great to take them to these ethnic places where people don't always speak the language.
To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.
Take all that is given whether wealth, love or language, nothing comes by mistake and with good digestion all can be turned to health.
As is the case with all good things in life - love, good manners, language, cooking - personal creativity is required only rarely.
I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she's pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do.
There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
It's funny - I was a big fan of 'The Sopranos.' It became kind of a threat to 'The X-Files' in a way because they could play with language, character, and story in ways that we never could because of the limitations of network television.
No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening.
I try to speak in everyday language. I feel like God has gifted me to take Bible principles and make them practical.
English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words.
What is it that really makes us, us? It's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness.
All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.
As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.
I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.
Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out.
People in day-to-day life tend to skim the surface of things and be polite and careful, and that's not the language I speak. I like talking about feelings, fears and memories, anguish and joy, and I find it in music.
You need to find somebody who will speak the same language. We understand that we couldn't have any kind of discussion without permission, without a legal framework behind it.
My mom had this romantic notion of her children playing classical music. The idea is you learn it when you're still learning language. It's using the same part of the brain.
The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.
