A lover cannot deny love. The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective. I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse. 1889 Brevity is the sister of talent.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. The palest ink is better than the best memory. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation. From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. John Ciardi Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation cares about its own identity.