Whenever you try and simplify how people speak, it's just hard to squish them into a simple rule. Language doesn't work that way.

I think when dictionaries define words, there's a sort of hair-splitting that to most people doesn't make any sense, which is we're not describing what a thing is.

Lexicographers may be nerds who don't like human contact, but we're still people.

Words have always been political, and that means that, in many people's minds, dictionaries are political. Because that's what dictionaries do: they do words.

We want to emulate the educated class, even if we don't think of educated people as a class these days.

ALL words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine from them in some remote part of Wales?

Confrontation is what happens when you are less than honest and you get caught.

Change of habit cannot alter Nature.

The mere fact of knowing that a great audience waits on your labor is enough to shake all your nerves to pieces.

There have been other tracks that separated the men from the boys. This is the track that will separate the brave from the weak after the boys are gone.

Would the Iraq War have occurred without WMD? I doubt it.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

Any power, of course, depends upon the values of the person exercising the power.

I figure I write for people who are intelligent enough to do some labor. Lazy readers are not my ideal readers.

If it's January, I'm dead in three hours. But in June, I'd be hungry, but I'd make it out. I'd find my way without a map or compass. I say that with confidence. I can build a fire without a match.

It's a world in which people's motives are questionable and shadowy.