“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
(on Ernest Hemingway”

“The Lord will always send a people wake-up calls. And he has been sending us wake-up call, after wake-up call, after a wake-up call. … He has been sending us wake-up calls, and you can send two kinds of wake-up calls. One through fear, like 9/11. 9/11 woke us up, and we stood shoulder-to-shoulder for a very short period of time.”

“The Dictionary, great work though it be, might have been successfully carried through by a merely mechanical genius.”

“If you'd never been born, then you might be an Isn't!
An Isn't has no fun at all. No, he disn't.”

“For certainly it is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them.”

“Mister Dictionary has failed us yet again.”

“There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience…”

“The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense—which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance ("Good Readers and Good Writers", p. 3).”

“Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.”

“The language of ideas creates a different universe: a universe which has multiplied the monkey's vocabulary of forty words to the million words in the English dictionary.”