Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had this power.

I used to think the power of words was inexhaustible,
That how we said the world was how it was, and how it would be,
I used to imagine that word-sway and word thunder
Would silence the Silence and all that,
That words were the Word,
That language could lead us inexplicably to grace,
As though it were geographical.
I used to think these things when I was young.
I still do.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle.

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

I do believe in an everyday sort of magic — the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.

I had believed something probably not true, yet it was wonderful to have believed it.

I think I fell in love with words before I fell in love with music.

Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

Knowing there's one thing I still haven't told you: I now believe, by the way, that miracles can happen.

"There's magic, positive magic, in such phrases as: "I may be wrong. I frequently am. Let's examine the facts.

Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.

I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.