45 Quotes by Stanley Fish

It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.

The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,..

What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.

Just as you can practice three – word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.

The word “essay” means to try out, test, probe. In the essay style, successive clauses and sentences are not produced by an overarching logic, but by association; the impression that prose gives is that it can go anywhere in a manner wholly unpredictable.

Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn’t make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.

And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning.