American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them.
If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'
Rappers tend to use words sometimes that just rhyme and don't really mean nothing.
I'm not 21 and trying to prove something with my words.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.
I write as if I were drunk. It is a process of intuition rather than placing myself above my story like a puppeteer pulling strings. For me, it's a scary, chaotic process over which I have little control. Words demand other words, characters resist me.
These days, you have the option of staying home, blogging in your underwear, and not having your words mangled. I think I like the direction things are headed.
There are times over different projects when I've asked the writers why people are swearing for no good reason. I tell them that it would be funnier if there weren't these swear words.
When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Leadership is practiced not so much in words as in attitude and in actions.
Pride is tough. You go to high school, and its 'pride,' 'courage;' it's all these types of words that we use to motivate us. I don't think there's anywhere in the Scriptures through the saints' lives where pride was ever a positive characteristic of anybody.
We looked too long for God and truth through words alone. The fruit for humanity has been rather limited, it seems to me - especially when I observe every day the extraordinary amount of unhappy and angry people in well educated and 'religious' countries.
Always remember the last words of my grandfather, who said: 'A truck!'
Words that add no new information or aren't repeated for emphasis are just padding. A sentence may carry three or five or eight of them, each one as unnoticeable as an extra two ounces on your hips but collectively adding up to a large burden of fat.
Texting has reduced the number of waste words, but it has also exposed a black hole of ignorance about traditional - what a cranky guy would call correct - grammar.
When you pray, rather let your heart be without words than your words without heart.
Genuine good taste consists in saying much in few words, in choosing among our thoughts, in having order and arrangement in what we say, and in speaking with composure.
Many, whose hearts are conquered by acute spite, roll out balanced tales from their own heart, which do not balance when you weigh words against deeds.
A fight can express things people might not be able to say with words.
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
No day of my life passes without someone saying the words 'Monty Python' to me. It's not bad.
You have to learn the playbook inside and out. You have to learn code words for each play. You have to learn defenses.
The history of nations shows that words are not always immediately followed by action.
Either Mitt Romney through his own words and his own signature was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony, or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people.
I talk by playing, not by words.
When the script is finished, and you're sitting around at a table read, and all the actors are reading the words that you've written, and you're hearing it out loud for the first time, that is always, every single time, no matter what, a magical process.
Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body.
Thoughts are the gun, words are the bullets, deeds are the target, the bulls-eye is heaven.
Words fashioned with somewhat over precise diction are like shapes turned out by a cookie cutter.
When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths or to reject absurdities and palpable contradictions.
I provide the bricks and mortar with the words and situations - the director and the actors and the designers build the house.
If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
Now begins a torrent of words and a trickling of sense.
My Hindi is OK. I think I am better with Tamil. I remember the Tamil words.
Three hundred words in a day is not a lot. So much of it is thinking before writing. And then there's the cutting. But you do what you do and keep moving forward.
