A Quote by Howard Hodgkin

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

Howard Hodgkin

Quote Topics

Able Anything Language Lost Say Say Anything Use

Quote Author

Howard Hodgkin
British - Artist
Born: August 6, 1932

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldnt be able to say anything.

Howard Hodgkin

Bilingual-education advocates say it's important to teach a child in his or her family's language. I say you can't use family language in the classroom - the very nature of the classroom requires that you use language publicly.

Richard Rodriguez

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.

Chinua Achebe

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.

Ursula K. Le Guin

I watched the gorilla's eyes again, wise and knowing eyes, and wondered about this business of trying to teach apes language. Our language. Why? There are many members of our own species who live in and with the forest and know it and understand it. We don't listen to them. What is there to suggest we would listen to anything an ape could tell us? Or that it would be able to tell us of its life in a language that hasn't been born of that life? I thought, maybe it is not that they have yet to gain a language, it is that we have lost one.

Douglas Adams

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.

John Milius

I lost my phone and I just really didn't look for it. It was the nicest feeling, like six weeks. ... A couple of times I needed to use a telephone, and I was always able to touch someone that had a telephone and say, "Hey, can I use your phone? May I please?" And they'd say, "Sure." And that was it! So it was OK, it was a real vacation. I took a real vacation from myself.

Bill Murray

Whereas, according to the declaration of that true man of the world Talleyrand, the use of language is to conceal the thoughts; this is to declare in the present instance, when I say I am not able to bear much talking, it means really, and without any mistake, or equivocation, or oblique meaning, or implication, or subterfuge, or omission, that I am not able; being at present rather weak in the head, and able to work no more.

Michael Faraday

Language designers want to design the perfect language. They want to be able to say, 'My language is perfect. It can do everything.' But it's just plain impossible to design a perfect language, because there are two ways to look at a language. One way is by looking at what can be done with that language. The other is by looking at how we feel using that language-how we feel while programming.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

I feel that everyone who wants to say anything, do anything, should be able to say anything or do anything, within the limits of not hurting another person.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

One sacrifice has to be made: never use harsh or rude language. Foul language you can use; foul language doesn't hurt. Foul language is forgivable (though it is bad). But rude language cannot be forgiven.

Harbhajan Singh Yogi

It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

Robert A. Heinlein

Now the point of comedy is not just looking funny, it's use of language. We have at our disposal a great language... and the imaginative, creative use of that language can be at the service of humour.

Barry Humphries

I believe that we must use language. If it is used in a feminist perspective, with a feminist sensibility, language will find itself changed in a feminist manner. It will nonetheless be the language. You can't not use this universal instrument; you can't create an artificial language, in my opinion. But naturally, each writer must use it in his/her own way.