As is the case with all good things in life - love, good manners, language, cooking - personal creativity is required only rarely.
Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
I always change my words in everything I do. I make the language fit, because I know the character from the inside out. Often character actors are not in a position to do that, but I do it. I don't change any cue and I never change anybody else's lines, but I make my own words fit my mouth.
There's always so much more that can be conveyed on screen visually in the expressions of people's faces, in their bodies, in their body language. And also with sound design, with music.
I don't know what happens at radio as far as what is that X factor that makes a song click and have people get connected to it when it's in another language.
I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.
I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.
There are Latino people in our world who believe strongly that if you are Latino you should speak the language, you should eat the food, you should listen to the music, you should be proud. And when you don't do those things, some people will look at it as if you're neglecting who you are.
Language is a virus from outer space.
You write a book, it's out for however many years, and with the passing of time, you're not the same person. I'm not the same person I was when I wrote those books; I'm not even the same person I was when I started writing 'Beg.' I had many shifts spiritually, and one of them was in the use of language.
In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home.
I wanted to write for all children, even those kids who might see language as a threatening thing, even if English is their second language.
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
I wouldn't call myself a dancer. I would never even dance in a club - I can't move my feet! I'm terribly shy about moving. I feel comfortable in my body, but dancing is like learning another language.
The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that's how it should be. For that's how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies.
I don't know what 'operational control' of the border means, but I do understand the English language. And as I understand that phrase, that's not true. We do not have operational control.
Our culture, language, history, and values are vital to uniting us as a nation.
Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.
Bunny boiler is now part of our language, and I'm proud of that.
One advantage of photography is that it's visual and can transcend language.
It's an important social duty to spread the word of English to people whose livelihoods depend on knowing the language.
Writers let themselves be enticed by the language.
But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.
Karaoke was my family's happy secret. In those early years in America, like many immigrants, my parents struggled with poverty and loneliness, but they also built provisional families, and inside our bubble there was joy, understanding, an intimate language I could never translate - and above all there was song.
More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows from the self-forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it.
To become a mother is to learn a whole language - to relearn it, perhaps, as it was the tongue to which we were born - and hence gain entrance to a forgotten world of comprehension.
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.
Further, I'm obsessed with how language contorts and creates bodies.
The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.
Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it.
Music is not supposed to be nationalist. It is supposed to surpass language barriers. It is about generations communicating with each other.
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
