"They said I couldn't play anything but an English boy. I knew I could. So I went to New York."

Language, Play

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"They said I couldn't play anything but an English boy. I knew I could. So I went to New York."

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"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Poet

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"Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns."

Kurt Vonnegut, American Author

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"English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing."

Robert A. Heinlein, American Writer

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"There has to be new words to explain new worlds."

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"The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries."

Mark Twain, American Author

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"In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything."

Neil Gaiman, British Author

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"I liked, as I like still, to make words look self-conscious and foolish, to bind them by mock marriage of a pun, to turn them inside out, to come upon them unawares. What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do god and devil combine to form a live dog?"

Vladimir Nabokov, American Novelist

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"She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else."

Jonathan Safran Foer, American Novelist

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"A dog is der Hund the dog; a women is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the same dog he was before? No sir; he is das Hundes; put him in the Dative case & what is he? Why, he is dem Hund. Now you snatch him into the accusative case & how is it with him? Why he is den Hunden? ... Read moreBut suppose he happens to be twins & you have to pluralize him, what then? Why sir they'll swap that twin dog around thro' the four cases till he'll think he's an entire International Dog Show all in his own person. I don't like dogs, but I wouldn't treat a dog like that. I wouldn't even treat a borrowed dog that way."

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"The world is built with words."

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Explore more quotes by Roddy McDowall

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"My whole life I've been trying to prove I'm not just yesterday."

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"I can't say I was unhappy as a child actor in films. I had a particularly wonderful time."

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"I started to study, because I knew I had to learn a lot about myself as an actor; you can't act the same as you did as a child."

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"I still have the actor's disease. I always think I'll never get another job."

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"I enjoyed being in movies when I was a boy. As a child you're not acting - you believe."

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"They said I couldn't play anything but an English boy. I knew I could. So I went to New York."

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