You can't live an entire lifetime with a language, stretching it lengthwise, exploring it, poking around in its hair and its belly, without having this intimacy become second nature to you. That's what happened to me with Spanish. The spoken language has other dimensions: the written language acquires unexpected elasticity. Using language like clothes or the skin on your body, with its sleeves, its patches, its transpirations, and its blood and sweat stains, that's what shows a writer's mettle. This is style.
-Pablo Neruda, Memoirs