Because there is no better tool for writing than experience. It has very little to do with grammar and everything to do with knowing.
A. A. Gill
Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.
A. N. Wilson
A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'
A. P. Martinich
In seventh and eighth grade, grammar and vocabulary were not my favorite subjects.
Aaron Lazar
Growing up in the Boroughs, I thought I must be the cleverest boy in the world, an illusion that I was able to maintain until I got to the grammar school.
Alan Moore
If I'd been from a different background, I could have gone to a grammar school, I suppose. I might have been a different person.
Alex Higgins
I am learning the grammar of acting on the sets. And I am happy that way.
Ali Fazal
In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have... But I never did write a play.
Alice McDermott
I'm not arguing for a return to the grammar school system, but there must be a way of identifying bright kids from ordinary backgrounds and giving them a world-class education.
Andrew Neil
The Margaret Thatchers of this country made it through - like I did - because of the grammar school system, which gave the opportunity of a lifetime to working-class kids. It put them on a level playing field with the privately educated kids, and opened up the top universities to them.
As one of the grammar-school generation, I grew up as part of a postwar meritocracy that steadily infiltrated the citadels of power.
When I was at Paisley Grammar we were equipped to compete with the private-school kids - and encouraged to do so. The sky was the limit, provided we had ability, ambition and a capacity for hard work.
Grammar schools are about stigmatising children, not on the grounds of their ability, but on their background.
Angela Rayner
The evidence shows that grammar schools overwhelmingly benefit those from more affluent backgrounds.
We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy.
Anne Carson
I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.
Anthony Holden
My elder brothers were all put apprentices to different trades. I was put to the grammar-school at eight years of age, my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the Church.
Benjamin Franklin
In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!
Beverly Cleary
As a former high school teacher and a student in a class of 60 urchins at St. Brigid's grammar school, I know that education is all about discipline and motivation. Disadvantaged students need extra attention, a stable school environment, and enough teacher creativity to stimulate their imaginations. Those things are not expensive.
Bill O'Reilly
It's really difficult for me. Language, I am sorry that I haven't. I think I just always expected that you learn a word in place of a word and when I discovered how difficult the grammar was and learning that was very discouraging for me.
Bo Derek
Then when I was in grammar school I played the clarinet, and then, after clarinet I played the flute in college orchestra - besides singing in the college chorus and things like that.
I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.
I had really good English teachers in elementary through high school. Not only were we required to read a lot - which is the best training for writing - we were drilled on grammar every day, every night. I hated the drill part, but I don't dangle my participles too often.
I can't spell or do grammar, but I'm smarter and more serious than people think. I'm no featherweight when it comes to digging deep and being involved. So many stars I know do so much. It's our duty to give back.
In my youngest days, the nuns at my grammar school drummed into us that we were in this world to make it a better place - not just for ourselves, but for other people, too. So from the very beginning, I've been driven by this idea that we have to make a difference, and it's one of the reasons I went into law in the first place.
I remember my first day at grammar school, being the only person who was me. Everybody else was like everybody else, and there I was, tanned, in a freezing cold playground in the middle of Middlesbrough, wondering what on earth I was doing there.
I think most people agree there is a component of skill in art making; you have to learn grammar before you learn how to write.
By the time I reached the sixth form at my local grammar school, my father would glower at me every time I passed him with a stack of books under my arm, warning me there was no money to go to university.
On 'Frasier,' a network executive once suggested that one week we have John Lithgow play Frasier and Kelsey Grammar play Lithgow's role on '3rd Rock From the Sun;' I've been deeply afraid of the idea of a crossover ever since.
I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies. I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home.
The way that I approached numbers, think about them, the same as for language as well-acquiring vocabulary, understanding the grammar, the structures of languages, the rhythm, the music and so-on - these things obviously evolved.
If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive.
My dad was the manager at the 45,000-acre ranch, but he owned his own 1,200-acre ranch, and I owned four cattle that he gave to me when I graduated from grammar school, from the eighth grade. And those cows multiplied, and he kept track of them for years for me. And that was my herd.
What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.
Of all the mediums that influence language, I think film is the one that has the most effect. Not so much from the point of view of pronunciation and grammar. I don't think we pick up very many sounds and grammatical instructions from the films we see - but the catchphrases.
I've asked every grammar schoolteacher in the nation to have their students write on the meaning of the Statue of Liberty. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the winning kid got up to the microphone and, in front of the world, had to dig into a pocket to pull out a crumpled sheet of paper containing the words that would move us all?
I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.
Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.
Not to age myself, but I remember vividly 'Schoolhouse Rock!' and entrust my grammar to it.
'Being Cyrus' is very young in language or grammar. I am not saying that these things can't be achieved in Hindi. All I am saying is that it would not be the same.
I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
My relationship with the mountains actually started when I was 16. Every year, a group used to be taken from Auckland Grammar down to the Tangariro National Park for a skiing holiday.
My mother was a schoolteacher and very keen that I go to a city school, so although it was fairly impoverished times, I traveled every day to the Auckland Grammar School.
My grammar school caught on to the fact that the reason I was falling asleep in class was that I was doing working men's clubs till 10 or 11 at nights. My mother was told I shouldn't do it anymore. Of course, I was bringing in money to the family, so nobody liked hearing that.
At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.
In grammar school, I didn't talk. Everybody said I was the invisible one. I'm still very shy.
I really like grammar. And spelling. I was a spelling-bee kid. I'm hard-core about grammar.
Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.
In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics.
