I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.
I don’t speak English or French, but that doesn’t mean anything.
The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship. A true friend would die for you, so when you start trying to count them on one hand, you don’t need any fingers.
See, Padam Kumar thinks and talks in Tamil and English. So for him, the words in ‘Supari’ were less important than how they were spoken.
Many great horror stories are period pieces and English actors have a facility for historic characters.
Why on earth do we want closer connection with England? We have little in common with English people except our language. We are fast becoming an entirely different people.
When I was 12 years old, I got interested in learning English.
I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.
I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she’s pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do.
Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.
Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.
My first semester of college, I’m going to sociology and English and psychology, and all I cared about was getting home and preparing for whatever audition I had.
There’s a famous artist, Ron English, in New York, that just, or Andy Warhol for that matter, that did pop art that terrorized society. And that’s, for the last like 10, 15 years, that’s all I wanted to do, is terrorize society and make them look into a mirror and see what the hell we have wrought.
I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which means I had a lot of formal training in reading.
I’ve always seen movies in English with Spanish subtitles. For audiences around the world, the language is less important than if it’s a good film.
An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke – although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.
The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.
My father is a poet. He’s a literary giant of this country – writes in Hindi – and also quite unique because he has a Ph.D. in English Literature. He taught at Harvard University, which is one of the most prominent universities in the country.
In India I’ve been to all the award functions, but that was in Hindi; now it’s in English so it’s a much bigger scale.
I speak three other languages – Serbian, French, and Italian – but typically read in English.
Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.
I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.
A friend of mine said, no matter what I do I always look like an English teacher. She actually said, you still look like a Campbell’s Soup kid.
Many schools today are sacrificing social studies, the arts and physical education so children can cover basic subjects like math, English and science.
‘Ouch’ is not independent of social training. One has only to prick a foreigner to appreciate that it is an English word.
In the first half of the 20th century, fashion was simply not a very English thing to do.
In October 1920 I went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist.
If I were to pray in Arabic, I’d pray to Allah. If I were to pray in English, I’d pray to God.
I don’t know what ‘operational control’ of the border means, but I do understand the English language. And as I understand that phrase, that’s not true. We do not have operational control.
The very notion of Great Britain’s ‘greatness’ is bound up with empire. Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth.
The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.
My love of reading and the English language is something given to me by my parents, and I’ve passed it on to my children.
I loved teaching English and giving my students confidence.
I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor.
I so want to be able to speak another language. I love the way my friends who are half Italian and half English break from one language into another without even pausing.
I’ll never forget where I’m from, never forget my roots. It doesn’t matter where I live. I’m English, simple as that.
I know for a fact if I were a white English fighter, maybe I would have been a superstar in Britain – and the world.
So I went to English school, secondary English school, so forget going to Mecca for my religious education.
I’m an English boy. I played a lot of sports growing up, but I never had any kind of workout regimen.
People are always saying, English, English, English rose, and I just feel so completely different.
My English teacher always gave me scripts for plays, but I was into sports. My friend said there were small parts I could go up for, but the director gave me the part of Mozart, which was kind of the lead role. From then on I just loved it.
I was a ‘reverence for life’ man – ‘see life steadily and see it whole’ – in my days as a lecturer in English lit. We are, I argued, if not exactly ‘saved’ by reading, at least partially ‘repaired’ by it: made the better morally and existentially.
English players are as easy to coach. The problem is that the Premier League has the best players in the world, and statistically not all of them can be born in England. But we don’t have enough English players: we are working very hard on it.
American fantasy is not a genre we think about too often. Sure, we are familiar with the worlds of English boarding school houses and castles and fairies, but true American fantasy, fantasy that is built on the land of this country, is hard to come by.
My father superintended the English part of my education, and to his care I am indebted for anything valuable which I may have acquired in my youth. He was my only intelligent companion, and was both a watchful parent and an affectionate friend.
I landed in New Jersey, where I could barely speak English, and I had to figure out what a short brown kid was going to do in this big white world.
Writing in English was a major challenge. I didn’t want other songwriters to write for me. I wanted to preserve the spirit of my songs in Spanish. I am the same Shakira in English as I am in Spanish.
When I took part in European leaders summits, it was sometimes unpleasant for me to hear Romanian, Polish, Portuguese, and Italian friends speak English, although I admit that on an informal basis, first contacts can be made in this language. Nevertheless, I will defend everywhere the use of the French language.
I always think if you are not a hard worker, you will get nowhere in English football.
For us Indians, I don’t think English can ever exude that magic of emotions which our mother tongue can.
I don’t believe in the so-called Latino explosion when it comes to movies. Jennifer Lopez doesn’t have an accent. She grew up in New York speaking English, not Spanish. Her success is very important because she represents a different culture, but it doesn’t help me.
There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.
The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.
The earliest English attempts at rhyming probably included words whose agreement is so slight that it deserves the name of mere ‘assonance’ rather than that of actual rhyme.
In Edna, I created a satiric portrait of my hometown of Melbourne, a large provincial English city paradoxically in far Southeast Asia. She’s a theatrical figure, related to vaudeville in some respects. She inhabits a world in which there are comparatively few female exponents of comedy.
The King of Prussia is innately a bad neighbor, but the English will also always be bad neighbors to France, and the sea has never prevented them from doing her great mischief.
No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.
For over ten years I always had, but I don’t speak English.
I don’t take the English press seriously at all because all they want is dirt… I hate them.
