“Language by its very nature is naive,we make it complex and naughty. We make it look and sound like what it is not.”

“Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.”

“We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.”

“Leverage is a term that makes us sound very sophisticated and wise when we use it. Let’s analyze what it really means.”

“Just as it looks as though the sun moves round the earth, so ordinary language seems to invert the relations between signifiers and signifieds, or words and their meanings. In everyday speech, it seems as though the word is simply the obedient transmitter of the meaning. It is as though it evaporates into it. If language did not conceal its operations in this way, we might be so enraptured by its music that, like the Lotus Eaters, we would never get anything done - rather as for Nietzsche, if we were mindful of the appalling butchery which produced civilised humanity, we would never get out of bed. Ordinary language, like history for Nietzsche or the ego for Freud, operates by a kind of salutary amnesia or repression. Poetry is the kind of writing which stands this inversion of form and content, or signifier and signified, on its feet again. It makes it hard for us to brush aside the words to get at the meanings. It makes it clear that the signified is the result of a complex play of signifiers. And in doing so, it allows us to experience the very medium of our experience.”

“Playing video games and making comics didn’t look like raw materials for success. In fact, what we were doing looked very similar to fucking around.”