Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can hel...
To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.
Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at a...
The thing that got me closest to doing Kermit was remembering what Jim did when he was doing Kermit. When he would do Kermit, there were certain faces that he made. There was a certain way he stood, a certain kind of body language that he had.
When I was in high school and college, I thought everybody could think in pictures. And my first inkling to my thinking was even different was when I was in college and I read an article about, you know, some scientist said that the caveman could not...
If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets...
You can write a radical Norwegian or a conservative Norwegian. And when I changed to a conservative Norwegian, I gained this distance or objectivity in the language. The gap released something in me, and in the writing, which made it possible for the...
I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in be...
We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go.
When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well.
A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of 'border,' and that is what I have experienced.
When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starti...
Americans think cinema is about storytelling; I don't believe that. I think it's a language and everyone has to find their own way of speaking. It's not so much what you say as the way you say it.
We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
A civil tongue speaks the language of masters. An uncivil tongue reveals character flaws of its master.
I don't think anybody in my family meant there to be any pressure for me to write. But our parents were incredibly verbal and wrote for a living. The house was full of books, and we all grew up steeped in language. I mean, our mother recited poetry a...
The government that governs from afar absolutely requires that the truth and the facts reach its knowledge by every possible channel, so that it may weigh and estimate them better, and this need increases when a country like the Philippines is concer...
All I'm asking for is the law that's been on the books for the last 33 years, no public funding for abortion. We are both saying the same thing, pro-life, pro-choice. Let's find the language that works for both of us so we can pass health care.
When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my books are read in 57 languages. But I am focused on Istanbul not because of Istanbul but because of humanity. Everyone is the same in the end.
History teaches us, in no mistaken language, how often customs and practices, which were originated without lawful warrant, and opposed to the sound construction of the law, have come to overload and pervert it, as commentators on the text of Holy Sc...
Children are extremely perceptive and absorb what goes on around them long before they can talk or even comprehend language. They are like finely tuned receivers that pick up much more than is merely said. They are receptive and attuned to every mood...
