“Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the examp...”

“Thousands of miles from Georgia, beginning that night in England, my dad became a foreign-language speaker to me and I was utterly charmed by it. I found the foreigner in myself.”

“Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not to clear thinking and basic decency but to the structured parts of ...”

“Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.”

“There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising.”

“Afrikaans was the language of the white minority in South Africa, and the forced learning of it created resentment among blacks. Even so, Nelson Mandela made it a point to learn this language in pr...”

“God can use the jawbone of an ass!”

“Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.”

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. ...”

“Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.”

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”