Top 40 Noun Quotes

We talk about cancer as a noun, as if it’s a one time event: ‘I’ve got cancer.’

A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is.

I still consider myself a New Yorker before all other nouns.

‘State’ can be a word that is a noun or a verb or an adverb – it’s kind of why I chose that title. It’s not to confound the audience but to keep me from painting myself into a cul-de-sac in the early stages of making a record by having too high concept or having some really strict set of rules I have to adhere to.

Just being able to get paid to do something you love is a wonderful thing. That said, a writer’s daily routine, unless you’re Dominick Dunne, isn’t exactly glamorous. Much of it amounts to drudgery, staring at a computer screen all day in a room by yourself, juggling nouns and verbs to make a demanding editor happy.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Andy wasn’t capable of any complicated thoughts or ideas. Ideas need a verb and a noun, a subject. Andy spoke in a kind of stumbling staccato. You had to finish sentences for him. So Andy operated through people who could do things for him. He wished things into happening, things he himself couldn’t do.

If you’re ever struggling for something to say, just take a noun and verbalize it. Using simple words in new and interesting ways will creativize your presence.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That’s what Norman Mailer did. That’s what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that’s what I do – that’s what I mean to do.

I think that we all do heroic things, but hero is not a noun, it’s a verb.

You have to look at the value of different kinds of words. Adjectives weaken, and adverbs come even farther down the line. Verbs are strong; verbs and nouns.

I actually have a thing about proper nouns. They clang on my ear in a weird way when I hear them dropped into movies.

The noun phrase straw man, now used as a compound adjective as in ‘straw-man device, technique or issue,’ was popularized in American culture by ‘The Wizard of Oz.’

Indian nouns are extremely connotive; that is, the name does more than simply denote the thing to which it belongs – in denoting the object, it also assigns to it some quality or characteristic.

If I can see my own recollections, like many adolescents, I was a Platonic realist. I believed in the reality of ideas, of the big nouns, and believed that one’s life was determined by the ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful which one held.

Why indeed must ‘God’ be a noun? Why not a verb – the most active and dynamic of all.

I think that the idea of a war on an abstract noun is unacceptable.

Any adjective you put before the noun ‘writer’ is going to be limiting in some way. Whether it’s feminist writer, Jewish writer, Russian writer, or whatever.

The word ‘universe’ is obviously not intended to have a plural, but science has evolved in such a way that we need a plural noun for something similar to what we ordinarily call our universe.

Names and other proper nouns shouldn’t distract from the language.

Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place.

Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.

But love is really more of an interactive process. It’s about what we do not just what we feel. It’s a verb, not a noun.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person’s memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it’s all action; you must push the story on.

I believe in the verb, not the noun – I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.

Jason Sudeikis said an SNL go-to for naming people was: regular first name, noun last name. My noun was Beard.

If you’re gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you’re sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.

Sometimes it feels hard to remember that Silicon Valley is an actual place, a collage of parched suburbs, and not just the collective noun for information-technology companies.

We’ve shown the entertainment industry what social media is capable of doing for a movie. ‘Sharknado’ is now a noun.

The Americans are very clear, and obsessed with nouns.

Marriage is not a noun; it’s a verb. It isn’t something you get. It’s something you do. It’s the way you love your partner every day.

I would say ‘woman’ used to be a noun, and now it is a noun and also an adjective. And words change their functions in that way. It’s one of the most common phenomena about words. They start as one thing, and they end up as something else.

How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they’re still considered stars.

God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

Here is God’s purpose – for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.

Leisure is not synonymous with time. Nor is it a noun. Leisure is a verb. I leisure. You leisure.

Nouns are seldom improved by the modifier ‘public.’ Few of us, given a private alternative, prefer public restrooms or public transportation or public displays of affection.

I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.

I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun.

The word deepfake has become a generic noun for the use of machine-learning algorithms and facial-mapping technology to digitally manipulate people’s voices, bodies and faces. And the technology is increasingly so realistic that the deepfakes are almost impossible to detect.