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"The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition."
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"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
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Personal Development
"But language is wine upon his lips."
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Personal Development
"Many terms which have now dropped out of favour will be revived and those that are at present respectable will drop out if useage so choose with whom resides the decision and the judgment and the code of speech."
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Personal Development
"A cliche is everything you've ever heard of."
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Personal Development
"When someone uses the phrase 'the prick one', and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word 'metaphorically', you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all."
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Personal Development
"Words like eyeglasses blur everything that they do not make clear."
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Personal Development
"Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage."
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Personal Development
"All words are pegs to hang ideas on."
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Personal Development
"Cheeses crusty, got all musty, got damp on the stone of a peach, I agreed. He looked blank, so I repeated it with proper emphasis. " ChEEZ-zes crusty. Got Al -musty. Got DAMp on the StoneofapeaCH."
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Personal Development
"Because words have deep meaning, Tweets have power."
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"The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition."
Language
"Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel."
Poems
"The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide."
Woman
"Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that."
Time
"Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically."
Writing
"The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior."
Pleasure
"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."
Literature
"Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community."
Community
"We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies."
Writing
"Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated."
Literature
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