I first decided that I wanted to act when I was 9. And I was at a very bizarre prep school at the time; to say ‘high Anglo-Catholic’ would be a real English understatement.
There’s a focus that hasn’t been there for ages and ages and some American bands are sounding quite English like they did in the late 70s and early 80s.
When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.
My parents are very funny when they have to deal with anything racy or off-color. They usually pretend they don’t speak English.
I’m obsessed with historical English royalty.
Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
I understand English; I read and write English perfectly, but the accent won’t go away.
I think audiences are far too sophisticated now to have an English actor putting on a Russian accent – it feels fake.
I met my wife through playing golf. She is French and couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak French, so there was little chance of us getting involved in any boring conversations – that’s why we got married really quickly.
English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.
I was always drawn to teachers who made class interesting. In high school, I enjoyed my American and English literature classes because my teachers, Jeanne Dorsey and Dani Barton, created an environment where interaction was important.
Most Americans don’t even know that Minnie Driver is English or that Catherine Zeta Jones is Welsh, but people are reminded every time ‘ER’ is shown that I’m the British Dr. Corday.
Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.
When I’m in Brazil, I’m not Brazilian at all; I am a gringo. And then when I’m in England, I’m not really English, but when I lived in Canada, I was considered too English. So I never really felt like I clicked somewhere or that I belonged to one place.
I love the musicality of English. French sounds flat. In English, you can play with pitch.
It’s funny how a film about a murderous old English toff can help you.
In 1763 the English were the most powerful nation in the world.
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
I am not accustomed to pay fulsome compliments to the English, by telling them that they are superior to all the world; but this I can say, that they do not deserve the name of cowards.
People learn English from ‘Full House.’ Candace’s husband, Valeri Bure, he learned to speak English watching it… ‘Aw, nuts.’ ‘You got it, dude.’
Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone.
Rick Ross is bigger to me than Dizzee Rascal. My music is more gangsta rap than anything English.
The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one’s making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don’t see how you can do it otherwise.
I grew up in a physical world, and I speak English. The next generation is growing up in a digital world, and they speak social.
It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand.
First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It’s astonishing. It pours out of him.
When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that’s become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.
Printing ballots in multiple languages costs millions of dollars every year. It also discourages immigrants from integrating into American society and gaining the benefits that come from speaking English.
The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.
This is what Hollywood tends to do. It tends to disregard tradition, history and anything factual, twisting it and turning it and making it all okay regardless of what the English may think of it.
There are some sounds that English singers find quite difficult to manipulate.
For me, even just being English was a whole sort of experience in as much as I’m Australian.
I’d forgotten I’d done the anime called Spirited Away, the English version of a Japanese film.
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.
I had higher math SATs than in English – yet I became an English major in college.
It’s not just the ‘Grammys’ that I’ve pulled out of. I also pulled out of the English awards as well. The reason that I wanted to pull out was because I believe very much that the music industry as a whole is mainly concerned with material success.
There’s no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.
Over 90 percent of parents in Puerto Rico want their children to be totally fluent in English.
I have both English bulldog determination and Bengal tiger strength.
I feel very English in a suit. There’s something about being in a suit abroad, particularly in America, that feels empowering.
Well, I’m having a good time. Which makes me feel guilty too. How very English.
For English assignments I was constantly coming up with these strange adventure stories… But I actually wanted to be an artist, or maybe work in the comic book industry.
My mom and my dad wanted my brother and I to have a better life, you know, better education, better jobs. It was probably harder, much, much harder, for my parents. When you’re a kid, you can learn a language much more easily; I learned English in less than a year.
We made sure that Ian Gwyn Hughes from the media department gave a speech about the anthem. We translated it into English, what the meaning of it is and it is very powerful.
Those are the two best words in English, ‘Bidding’ and ‘war’.
English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages because of its history as the primary language of science and its global reach.
I have mortally opposed the English king; I have stormed and taken the towns and castles which he unjustly claimed as his own.
It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the ’50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
The way the educational system in Russia works is studying a foreign language is part of the program, so by the time you get to the age of 10, you pick up another language. I speak a bit of Russian, a bit of English, a bit of Spanish a bit of French.
Nobody can doubt Puerto Rico, sociologically, linguistically, culturally, and historically, is a nation. We have our own rich culture, thousand years of history, unique territory, and almost everyone’s first language is Spanish, not English.
What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.
There are lots of concerns facing English football but for me the major one is the way in which football clubs are run by owners, whether they are growing organically and sustainably and how that is being policed by the football authorities.
In this country, it doesn’t make any difference where you were born. It doesn’t make any difference who your parents were. It doesn’t make any difference if, like me, you couldn’t even speak English until you were in your twenties.
I’d been trying for a while to get parts that weren’t just the English bad guy, so it was quite refreshing to be playing someone who was a compassionate, decent guy.
In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.
The Indians seemed to be living in a place and in a way that was of immense importance to me. So I associate learning to read – English, oddly enough – with wanting to know about Indians. I’m still growing into it. I’ve never outgrown that.
