Amoebas, once they have themselves well pulled in two, go their ways-they practice divorce, but no remarriage.

Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented.

If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.

The truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures which a workaday world can but seldom afford.

Jazz was formerly a crude term for indulging in an action which in polite society is referred to, if at all, only with such vague Latin terms as intercourse and cohabitation.

Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies know where they come from.

You and I who read and write books have very little effect upon language. We may think about it, write about it, and read about it, but it goes on without us, or in spite of us.

Language is a living thing. It must survive in men's minds and on their tongues if it survives at all.

Man can be defined, if one wishes, as a languag-ized mammal.

Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the most of it.

Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.

We want to be brothers and sisters. We want respect and equality. Simon Bolivar, our father, said a balanced world - a universe - a balanced universe in order to have peace and development.

Give me lace and whiskey, Mama's own remedy.

In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing.

I was always in bands before, but on 'American Idol,' it was about getting my voice out there. It was always my goal, though, to get a band together again.

Well Getaway was a script that was submitted to us for production and I read it and thought it would be a cool movie to make.

Multicultural is not a description of a category of American writing-it is a definition of all American writing.

There is no greater sin than desire, No greater curse than discontent, No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself. Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.