“You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.”

“Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.”

“So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.”

“Was it an insult to be called a “woman writer”? Didn’t it have a taint of, say, the “woman driver”?”

“The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler.”

“Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.”

“It is offensive that so many people feel that it is okay to publicly refer to transsexuals as being pre-op or post-op when it would so clearly be degrading and demeaning to regularly describe all b...”

“It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feel...”

“His sentences didn't seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action. ”

“One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjust...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”