And Diction Quotes

#1. This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: When Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.

Stephen Graham Jones

#2. If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point and diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.

Aristotle.

#3. The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Donna Tartt

#4. You know I am an actor, and I have medals for diction.

Paul Robeson

#5. Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all.

Winston S. Churchill

#6. How can one talk in a classical language about a child who's torn apart in an explosion in the market near his school? People in Iraq don't talk about their joys, their problems, and the destruction of the country in literary diction.

Hassan Blasim

#7. English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.

Vivien Leigh

#8. The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally

G.K. Chesterton

#9. Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.

Tim O'Brien

#10. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#11. The Press nowadays is not a literary press; classic diction and brilliancy of style do not distinguish it by any means.

Marie Corelli

#12. A Kedis troika approached afterward, colourcells winking in their frills, and the shemale speaker thanked him in her curious diction, shaking his hand with her prehensile genitalia.

China Mieville

#13. Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material, and every part of a poem works in conjunction with every other part - the content, the place, the diction, the rhythm, the tone-as well as the very sliding, floating, thumping, rapping sounds of it.

Mary Oliver

#14. When we are understood, we always speak well, and then all your fine diction serves no purpose.

Moliere

#15. I got hung up on diction and syntax; I agonized over every word.

M. Pierce

#16. Apostolic preaching is not marked by its beautiful diction, or literary polish, or Cleverness of expression, but Operates in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.

Arthur Wallis

#17. You don't want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power.

Rufus Choate

#18. For film and TV, try to have a more conversational tone. For stage, you'll need better diction and bigger vocal production.

Jason Fuchs

#19. We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to afflict the world, so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully.

Martin Buber

#20. Behold the works of our philosophers; with all their pompous diction, how mean and contemptible they are by comparison with the Scriptures! Is it possible that a book at once so simple and sublime should be merely the work of man?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#21. Poetry for me is a result of lyrical meditation, pre-verbal in origin, and much of the craft has to do with finding a contemporary diction that embodies, at times subverts but never betrays that pre-verbal lyrical source: the presence of song before it is sung.

John Allison

#22. The idea of 'talking white,' a lot of people grew up around that, just the idea that if you speak with proper diction and come off as educated that it's not black and that it's actually anti-black and should be considered only something that white people would do.

Chance The Rapper

#23. Exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction, merely vocal, is always in its childhood. As no man leaves his eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be no polished language without books.

Samuel Johnson

#24. However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.

J.L. Austin

#25. Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress ...

Blaise Cendrars

#26. [On Elizabeth Barrett Browning:] ... for finish, and melody of versification, there is nothing approaching to Miss Barrett in this day, or in any other - also for diction. Her words paint.

Mary Russell Mitford

#27. A writer need not be bound by flat statement like "It was a rough sea," when verbs like tumble and roil and seethe wait to spell from her pen.

Rebecca McClanahan

#28. When I'm on television, I'm talking to millions of people, so the conversation is totally different. My words are different. My diction is different because now I'm really talking American English and not homeboy English.

Keyshawn Johnson

#29. I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.

Paul Valery

#30. He used a minimum of words and no inflection whatsoever. It was a policeman's manner of speaking, direct and unadorned.

Davis Bunn

#31. I like to try and mix diction and experiences.

George Ezra

#32. A person asked me, How do you prepare for the stage? I told her, Well, it's like this. You go to diction school. They teach you to fill your mouth with marbles and talk right through the marbles. Each day you take one marble out. When you've lost all your marbles ...

Henny Youngman

#33. As a 13, - 14-year-old kid, I'd sit on my bed with a tape recorder and a newspaper. I would do my own newscast. I would practice my diction.

Lester Holt

#34. Voice really depends on the answer to the question, Who is telling this story? ... That will color your diction-and determine your metaphors, your sensibility.

Philip Gerard

#35. Jen and I were accustomed to our father's last-will-and-testament diction, and were at times free to interrupt Atticus for a translation when it was beyond our understanding.

Harper Lee

#36. Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life ...

Jane Hirshfield

#37. Men have begun to observe and classify, they turn from creation to Criticism ... It is the Fashion to be a wit ... one must be able to conceal indecency with elegant diction; manners are everything, morals nothing.

James Branch Cabell

#38. Being self-owned is a state of mind.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#39. In narration he affects a disproportionate pomp of diction and a wearisome train of circumlocution, and tells the incident imperfectly in many words, which might have been more plainly delivered in few.

Samuel Johnson

#40. Tell stories that matter. Diction is about characters who don't exist, but their pain and sorrow and joy are very real.

Brenda Rothert