Favorite Quotations About Words, Vol. 1

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
— Mark Twain, 1888

'Well,' said Owl, 'the customary procedure in such cases is as follows.'

'What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?' said Pooh. 'For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.'

'It means the Thing to Do.'

'As long as it means that, I don't mind,' said Pooh humbly.'

— A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926

MORE TO EXPLORE: Unusually Long English Words

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.
— James Baldwin, interviewed in LIFE, 24 May 1963

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953

Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
— Dorothy Parker, interview in Paris Review, 1956

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
— Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Frederick Trevor Hill's Lincoln the Lawyer, 1906

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words all being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, 1980

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood, 1987

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
— George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

A kiss is a lovely trick, designed by nature, to stop speech when words become superfluous.
— Ingrid Bergman

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.
— Octavia Butler, interviewed in The Indypendent, 13 Jan. 2006

Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.
— William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, 1959

(A variation of this idea: "The road to hell is paved with adverbs." — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000)