I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

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.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.

The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.

The Vietnamese see their history as an unending series of struggles of resistance to aggression, by the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese, the French, and now the Americans.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit. I took classes at a community college in West L.A. I took psychology, English, and philosophy.

Sometimes I don’t use the words ‚will‘ and ‚want‘ in the right way. The German word ‚will‘ is the English word ‚want,‘ so that’s a little bit of the problem.

I think I should learn French and be a better cook – basic, really good life stuff.

The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.

The Welsh people have a talent for acting that one does not find in the English. The English lack heart.

I think you could ask 10 English people the same question about class and get a very different answer.

I went by myself to Hollywood, I spoke no English, every day I had to go to school.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn’t have connectives like ‚and‘ that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

I am most familiar with the Gujarati language.

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I’m delighted.

I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like detente when there’s a good English phrase for it – cold war.

It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of today.

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.

All the kids are learning different languages. I asked them what languages they wanted to learn, and Shi is learning Khmai, which is a Cambodian language; Pax is focusing on Vietnamese, Mad has taken to German and Russian, Z is speaking French, Vivienne really wanted to learn Arabic, and Knox is learning sign language.

Being ‚contented‘ ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

There are so many people in the world who cannot read English or French or whatever.

I don’t speak Spanish, I speak a little of Italian but no Spanish.

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there.

I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.

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.

How do I speak Spanish? Not too well.

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, ‚Blah, blah, blah.‘ That’s when I get crazy.