The primary function of the creative use of language – in our age – is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.

The Little Friend is a long book. It’s also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it’s about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

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.

Also, they don’t understand – writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.

When you are challenging the young, they can come back at you with language of tremendous power and they are no respecters of sacred cows, you know, the young. There’s nothing politically correct about the average young Australian when it comes to use of language.

There is undoubtedly much to learn about the social uses of language, for communication or for other purposes. But at present there is not much in the way of a theory of sociolinguistics, of social uses of languages, as far as I am aware.

If Woody Guthrie set the bar for American songwriters, Bob Dylan jumped right over it. No one I know will ever come close to possessing the beauty of melody and the use of language that Dylan shares with us, with ease.

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

I think we need to sort of broaden our definition of poetry, which maybe it’s a good thing that they just gave this Nobel Prize to [Bob] Dylan because blurring the lines of song lyrics and also hip-hop for me is like some of the greatest uses – most innovative uses of language in my lifetime.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it “vow-of-poverty prose.” No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.