I came to New York to study ballet and English.
No. I am not a royalist. Not at all. I am definitely a republican in the British sense of the word. I just don’t see the use of the monarchy though I’m fierce patriot. I’m proud proud proud of being English, but I think the monarchy symbolizes a lot of what was wrong with the country.
When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.
The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.
I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.
I am enjoying playing English football. It is very beautiful. With every game I play, I feel more comfortable.
Although spoken English doesn’t obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn’t know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage.
Everything has changed. When I was at school and was told I had better learn English, I said: What for? The English are a hell of a long way away!
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
I follow English football a lot and Ancelotti.
I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
My first language is both English and Spanish. My mom was raised in Los Angeles, so with her we spoke English, but my father was born in Cuba, so with him we spoke Spanish.
I like the English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.
My first kiss was in the geography room, where you put all the maps. I actually don’t know how to say it in English.
Even though you don’t understand what I’m saying, you are going to really feel it. The same thing happened to me when I used to listen to English music. I didn’t even understand one word. You know? But it just makes me feel great.
I don’t think the elite class is only speaking the good English.
This character’s entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn’t recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn’t read, because she doesn’t read English.
An English summer’s day is wonderful, but sometimes you have to look hard to find one!
My accent is… sort of an Edinburgh sort of soft southwest Scottish accent. It could almost be English.
My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.
I’m English. Our dentistry is not world famous.
My grandmother is bilingual, but she preferred to speak Spanish at home, so she would speak to us in Spanish, and everyone responded in English, sort of like what happens on ‘Jane.’
My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.
My parents are actually very famous singers in Bulgaria. My dad was in a rock band, and my mom was in a pop group. They met, fell in love, and actually formed a group together to escape the country because it was Communist, and they couldn’t leave. They didn’t know any English but eventually found their way to America.
I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.
Yes, for my undergrad I majored in Criminal Justice and minored in Political Science and English.
I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn’t me. I’m not a scholar; I didn’t have a scholar’s attitude toward literature.
I – and there are hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who felt on this subject as I do – have always liked my Celtic countrymen and disliked the English nation; it is a national trait of character, and I cannot help it.
What I appreciated was the fact that the script delved into how Australians were – and still are – condescended to by the English.
Ebonics – or black English, as I prefer to call it – is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.
Building walls is entirely sensible. We don’t need to do it. We have got the English Channel.
I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.
English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.
The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.
I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.
I was sick and tired of being an English actor who did a lot of American movies because I was cheap and good.
When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn’t speak a word of English. In England, people might be very understanding about that, but in Bombay, they’re not very forgiving. ‘If you don’t speak English, how do you expect to work in Hindi films?’
Perhaps it’s an accident of nationality, but the English treasure subtlety and appreciate not having everything spelled out for them, while Americans want everything made apparent.
English people don’t have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.
They said I couldn’t play anything but an English boy. I knew I could. So I went to New York.
If you see the Sopranos, you’re not going to be speaking in the Shakespearean English.
We shall never be understood or respected by the English until we carry our individuality to extremes, and by asserting our independence, become of sufficient consequence in their eyes to merit a closer study than they have hitherto accorded us.
I try to do it in both languages: English and Spanish. But sometimes I just Tweet in Spanish.
I never thought I will ever get back into films when I took that break. ‘English Vinglish’ just happened.
I am the granddaughter of an English woman. I love England and her people and, regardless of politics, consider you to be family… and always will.
And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.
I grew up speaking Korean, but my dad spoke English very well. I learned a lot of how to speak English by watching television.
Our English language really says if you’re not a theist, the only alternative is to be an atheist. What I’m trying to do is develop a language that will enable us to talk about God beyond the, what I think, are sterile categories of theism and atheism.
The romance of English football is fantastic, but it has lost its identity under the influence of other cultures.
The English approach to ideas is not to kill them, but to let them die of neglect.
I taught myself English. My English teacher was the sitcom ‘Friends.’ Back in the days when I was, like, 15, 14, it was like a syndrome for Korean parents to make their kids watch ‘Friends.’ I thought I was a victim at that time, but now I’m the lucky one.
I dropped out of high school when I was 16, after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word ‘existentialism.’
My stepmom’s from Somalia, my baby sister is African American, my dad was always English, I’m a white man… You may have noticed.
People have asked me why I made the first chapter of my first novel so long, and in an invented English. The only answer I can come up with that satisfies me is, ‘To keep out the scum.’
My first winter was also quite hard because you are not used to how cold it is. But I just tried to adapt as quickly as I could and I think I did well. I was speaking English after six months.
In Hollywood through the 50s, there were black, English, and Middle European housekeepers and maids.
For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.
The best-dressed man is an Italian who is trying to look English, or an Englishman who is trying to look Italian.
For you, it’s a silent movie. For us, it’s a talking movie because we had lines on set. There’s a lot of noise on set and music. We spoke in English, in French, in gibberish, but it was very alive. The challenge was tap dancing.
