The language of ideas creates a different universe: a universe which has multiplied the monkey's vocabulary of forty words to the million words in the English dictionary.

No writer ever knows enough words but he doesn’t have to try to use all that he does know. Tests would show that I had an enormous vocabulary and through the years it must have grown, but I never had a desire to display it in the way that John Updike or William Buckley or William Safire do to such lovely and often surprising effect. They use words with such spectacular results; I try, not always successfully, to follow the pattern of Ernest Hemingway who achieved a striking style with short familiar words. I want to avoid calling attention to mine, judging them to be most effective as ancillaries to a sentence with a strong syntax.
My approach has been more like that of Somerset Maugham, who late in life confessed that when he first thought of becoming a writer he started a small notebook in which he jotted down words that seemed unusually beautiful or exotic, such as chalcedony, for as a novice he believed that good writing consisted of liberally sprinkling his text with such words. But years later, when he was a successful writer, he chanced to review his list and found that he had never used even one of his beautiful collection. Good writing, for most of us, consists of trying to use ordinary words to achieve extraordinary results.
I struggle to find the right word and keep always at hand the largest dictionary my workspace can hold, and I do believe I consult it at least six or seven times each working day, for English is a language that can never be mastered.* [*Even though I have studied English for decades I am constantly surprised to find new definitions I have not known: ‘panoply’ meaning ‘a full set of armor’, ‘calendar’ meaning ‘a printed index to a jumbled group of related manuscripts or papers’. — Chapter IX “Intellectual Equipment”, page 306

"I probably have a 20,000-word vocabulary. I'll match my wits with anyone on literature, science and the arts."

The best way to enrich vocabulary is organically, by coming across words in their natural habitat, taking the time to learn about them, their histories, and making lifelong friends with them.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

A few musical notes can morph into countless new songs, and a small set of vocabulary can create a congeries of poems. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

Who needs a large vocabulary when you can just make up any word at any time? It makes life a whole lot more emeaglibop.

A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact".

[W]e talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state occassions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words.

Translation: He who writes in a rich language is like a man with many suits of clothes, some for home wear, others in which to appear in public, and others for state occasions.

Painting has a nature which is not entirely translatable into verbal language. I think painting is a language, actually. It's linguistic in a sense, but not in a verbal sense. I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. And I think that is true. One wants to be able to use all of one’s facilities in all aspects of one’s life.. .You may have to choose how to respond and you may respond in a limited way, but you have been aware that you are alive. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement.

All this takes many clumsy and inexact word-descriptions to describe, but if we read paintings like we read books, it would not be such a hidden language for painting can effortlessly produce such elegant solutions.

A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.

I write visually. I'm a painter who uses words.