Language Quotes

As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.

I can ask for cigarettes in every language.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

The 1990s were also when a bunch of the soft-shoe language for race, gender, and class became paramount.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the ’60s: Independent fire!

I’ve done so many interviews over the years in so many different languages. Radios. Papers. Magazines. There’s always another interview to do. It’s quite something, I have to say.