English quotes

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.