The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems.

I remember my mother finding mud somehow and putting it on the sting.

When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.

To be anywhere near an enormous ocean liner when you are just like a fish in the water is frightening.

My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.

On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me.

I'm only interested in fiction that in some way or other voices the very imagination which is conceiving it.

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

As in The Lime Twig dream and illusion are right at the center of Charivari.

Really, I didn't like Alaska. It rained, almost every day, at least 300 days out of the year.

It's hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they're all the same, I'm convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth.

In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old.

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.

My mother wanted very much to play tennis; she wanted, most of all, to be a singer and play the piano.

I had to go to Sunday school once or twice in my life, and that's where I commented someplace on hearing.

I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal.

I was not typical. Whatever typical or normal is, I was somehow separated and different.

I didn't for a moment doubt the choice, but if life is ever fearsome, it is truly fearsome then.

I didn't know what kind of jobs, because how was I prepared? At best, I would be an AB in English.

When we lived in Juneau, Alaska, it was a town of about 7,000 people, and totally isolated; the only way to get to it was by ship.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there.

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic.

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

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 done.

Music is the soul of language.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.

There are infinite shadings of light and shadows and colors... it's an extraordinarily subtle language. Figuring out how to speak that language is a lifetime job.

Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage.

I'm really fascinated and you know I've been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way.

Two races share today the soil of Canada. These people had not always been friends. But I hasten to say it. There is no longer any family here but the human family. It matters not the language people speak, or the altars at which they kneel.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

They are damn good projects - excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there - God damn it!

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.