I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.
Writing about our gods in English is unnatural, but I believe language is just a carrier - a means to an end.
I'm not the least bit polished, I come from a blue collar background and I never thought I could feel comfortable around the English.
'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it.
In Sweden, they broadcast the American shows in English with Swedish subtitles, whereas in many European countries they dub them. Watching those shows in English was big for me.
Trees are great. Don't get me started about how clever they are, how oxygen-generous, how time-formed in inner cyclic circles, how they provide homes for myriad creatures, how - back when this country was covered in forests - the word for sky was an Old English word that meant 'tops of trees.'
Sham marriages have been widespread; people have been allowed to settle in Britain without being able to speak English; and there have not been rules in place to stop migrants becoming a burden on the taxpayer. We are changing all of that.
I speak English, Portuguese, and French. One day I'd love to learn Italian.
To be an English person in my 20s, doing a Broadway show - it's one of the mountains I wanted to climb.
Americans aren't good at accents, but the English are because their accents change. You go five or six blocks and the accent is different, so they are used to hearing different pitches. In America, you gotta travel maybe 10 states before you can really hear a difference.
Somebody should tell the president of Mexico that when he appears on American television, he should speak English.
I've been trying to... Having been an English literary graduate, I've been trying to avoid the idea of doing art ever since. I think the idea of art kills creativity.
I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia.
With the United States in slow long-term decline, how will that affect the position of English? And where will all that leave monolingual Britain? Our political leaders like to boast about how global Britain is, but when it comes to languages, it is near the bottom of the global league, together with another island state, Japan.
All English people have a fascination with Jack the Ripper. I don't know why, because it's so dreadful, but such a strange, endearing part of our culture. Morbid fascination sums it up.
I don't think the elite class is only speaking the good English.
When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
We're in a long line of English people pretending to be Americans and not being as good as Americans.
The English have a special sense of humour. This I immediately experienced in the dressing room. As I walked with two plates while eating, suddenly a team-mate asked me, 'Basti, what time is it?' hoping I would automatically turn my hand to look at my watch. That's quite entertaining.
Everybody in Spain is sick of me. But in America, there's curiosity about the new kid on the block who doesn't speak English very well. The attention makes me feel vulnerable, which is something I hadn't felt in a while. But I like it.
Today, for the first time in history, a Bishop of Rome sets foot on English soil. This fair land, once a distant outpost of the pagan world, has become, through the preaching of the Gospel, a beloved and gifted portion of Christ's vineyard.
English food writer Elizabeth David, cook and author Richard Olney and the owner of Domaine Tempier Lulu Peyraud have all really inspired the way I think about food.
My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children's books, and so I did.
I don't feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don't feel either. And, in another way, of course, I'm both.
I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.
English is my language because of the history, and what I try to do - and I did that in 'Carpentaria' in particular - is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.
I always thought those World War II films with German people speaking English with German accents was weird.
My family is Abenaki Indian on my mother's side. My father's side of the family is Slovak, and we also have some English ancestry.
Weirdly, when I'm playing an English person, I feel like I've got nothing to hang on to, and it feels a bit strange and exposing.
My first audition happened to be for 'Kindergarten Cop,' and I took that role. I was only starting to learn English at that point. Spanish is my first language, so they made me a speaking character in the movie. I didn't really know I was shooting a movie. I was just having a lot of fun with 30 kids my own age.
The Football Association have always acted more as a referee than a governor. And the FA, aware the Premier League provide players for the England team, have always had too gentle a hand on the tiller. The result is that the Premier League are the tigers in the English football jungle everybody's scared of.
When I was in the ninth grade, I had a teacher in Dallas, Texas, named Elizabeth Enlow in English class. Every Friday, we had to write a little essay, and you had to incorporate three particular words into the story. That was the sole direction. And to me, this was so much fun.
Iggy Pop is a pure Michigan product - gritty, smart, but not afraid of looking stupid or foolish. His father was once a high school English teacher. I love Iggy as a physical entity, sinewy, twisty - even in old age - an embodiment of rock and roll history.
English is the only interesting thing that's left in my life.
I never felt that although we were based in Germany, Puma was and should be considered as a German brand. So we restructured it in a way that positioned us as a global brand, with English being the corporate language, rather than us looking at it from a German perspective.
