“A Writer Can Have Only One Language”– 5 Quotes on Multilingualism in Literature

 
The following five quotes – excerpted from A Quotionary: The Ultimate Collection of Quotations About Writing and Writers, by Jenny Hobbs – grapple with the issue of multilingualism and whether or not knowing more than one language hampers or helps the writer.

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Read the quotes:

A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.
- Philip Larkin

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.
- Ezra Pound

We may speak English at the free market bazaar, but our moral choices and the trials of our daily existence – birth, death, worship, celebration and so on – are locked up in our mother tongues.
- Kole Omotoso

In Africa, language is not something we just use to communicate. You have to decorate it; the language has to be rich.
- Kgebetli Moele

If the writer has the mixed blessing of a foreign language spoken in the household of childhood, there is the broken language of more than one culture to fall back on.
- Elizabeth Jolley

 
Related links:

• Presenting A Quotionary: The Ultimate Collection of Quotations About Writing and Writers by Jenny Hobbs

• How to Write a Bestseller – 9 Tips from the Late, Great Bryce Courtenay

• 11 Quotations to Remember Nadine Gordimer, a Year After Her Death

• 19 Pieces of Writing Advice from South Africa’s Literary Greats

Book details

• A Quotionary: The Ultimate Collection of Quotations About Writing and Writers by Jenny Hobbs
  EAN: 9781928216520
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• Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth
  EAN: 9781620407813
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• Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Critical Essays and Articles about Joyce by Ezra Pound, edited by Forrest Read
  EAN: 9780811201599
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• The Combat by Kole Omotoso
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  EAN: 9780143185536
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• Untitled by Kgebetli Moele
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  EAN: 9780795704949
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• The House of Fiction: Leonard, Susan and Elizabeth Jolley by Susan Swingler
  EAN: 9781922247292
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