Our expression and our words never coincide, which is why the animals don't understand us.
Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.
When American poet Alice Notley was very young, she used to sit in front of the radio and just listen. When she got older, she began to hear words and songs in her head everywhere she went - songs she loved, like 'Begin the Beguine' by Cole Porter, and her own words that sometimes tumbled out into poems.
I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.
The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand. If someone wants to place the word 'God' on those collections of words, it's OK with me.
Obama's gift for delivering set-piece oratorical tours de force had special resonance to Americans fed up with a president who could hardly string two words together without a collision of syntax and whose idea of clever was the single entendre.
The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial.
There's many ways you communicate. With colour, texture, sound... Even words can communicate.
When I started rhyming, my favorite rhythms were from John Coltrane and some of the things he did on sax. And certain rhythms that I hear on drums, I try to emulate with my words, dropping on the same patterns that them beats or them notes would hit.
When I turned 45, I lay in bed reflecting on all life had taught me. My soul sprang a leak and ideas flowed out. My pen simply caught them and set the words on paper. I typed them up and turned them into a newspaper column of the 45 lessons life taught me. When I hit 50, I added five more lessons and the paper ran the column again.
Words can come and go. Your acts are going to speak for themselves.
I don't have any particular desire to see words making a comeback. They are of their era, after all, and that is their identity - they form part of the linguistic color of a period.
Some comedians tell nice jokes that you can tell to your kids. Some use bad words - they work 'blue.' If you don't want to hear a joke that's blue, you shouldn't go to a comedy club where a comedian who makes blue jokes is performing.
Words of comfort, skillfully administered, are the oldest therapy known to man.
Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and repeat to yourself, the most comforting words of all; this, too, shall pass.
I've always had a soft spot for comic books. I learned to read from them. The words in them were so interesting.
When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.
A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.
If there are three words that need to be used more in American journalism, commentary, politics, personal life... it's the magic words 'I don't know.'
Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump.
