A Quote by Isaac Asimov
Speech as known to us was unnecessary. A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to a long-winded redundancy. A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line--even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice.
Related Quotes
The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn’t say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.
Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is, where the speaker would pause for emphasis, or take a breath. The best test for locating an attributive is to speak the sentence aloud.
The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression - all of that is very important.
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.
These Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt. Most of us dont fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating
Just the fact that there's motion and sound, took me a long time on Walking Dead to get used to the fact that in television, characters don't have to say things. In comics, people have to say I feel this way, or I want to do this, and you can do so much with gesture and movement and facial expressions that you can do sometimes facial expression stuff in comics, but you can do so more if somebody can move around without actually speaking. That leads to a different style of writing between the two mediums.
Designers and advertisers like the idea of my breasts, waist line, long legs, and long neck - but have literally made gagging noises at my facial features.
Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.
A dependent clause (a sentence fragment set off by commas, dontcha know) helps you explore your story by moving you deeper into the sentence. It allows you to stop and think harder about what you've already written. Often the story you're looking for is inside the sentence. The dependent clause helps you uncover it.
Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can.
Not only does the modern person often think that sight is more important than sound - there's no objective evidence to indicate that. Many people, even audiologists who study the science of human speech and hearing, have assumed for a long time that the human ear evolved to hear the human voice, rather than the voice changing to fit the human ear. And the human ear is actually not a perfect match if we map its sensitivity to the different frequencies in the human range of hearing; it's an unequal curve, it's kind of a wavy line.
I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines. Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem - just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.
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