Although I feel very French, a part of my heart is in the States. When my brother and I arrived, we didn't really speak any English, and when we left, that's all we spoke when we played together. It was just a beautiful place to grow up.
Stephen Fry is a master exponent of the English tongue. Some people might think that he is the most irritating man in Britain, but my wife and I love him all the same.
I consider myself a Londoner first, and then I consider myself Brazilian before I consider myself English.
Yeats regarded his work as the close of an epoch, and the least of his later lyrics brings the sense of a great occasion. English critics have tried to claim him for their tradition, but, heard closely, his later music has that tremulous lyrical undertone which can be found in the Anglo-Irish eloquence of the eighteenth century.
I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.
Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch's career as a journalist, so we've kind of kept in touch over the years.
I would like to be able to be both a film actor and a stage actor - to be an American actor in the style of a lot the English actors who do films. They are these wonderful actors who can do everything.
The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
Within the black community, roughly 60 percent of children are born to single moms. Moms don't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with their children. Their English is atrocious. Their speaking is atrocious. The dropout rate is horrendous.
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.
We're more familiar with what economists call an English auction - prices start low and rise as people bid. However, there is also the Dutch auction, where prices start high and go lower until somebody bites. Movies are sold to the audience via a very slow Dutch auction, where each phase between price drops can last weeks or months.
When I was 14, I came to school in London. I remember it was very cold, but also having to adjust and become fluent in English.
I love New York, but I have to admit that I feel very English, and I do miss that sense of history that you have everywhere in Britain.
To cultivate an English accent is already a departure away from what you are.
There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.
When I was a boy, cricket was very, very English. Anyone who spoke English and anyone from a big town could play. And that was it.
After I arrived in Mountain View, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my new home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it was hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang.
Well, I'm English.
I was Irish; I was a woman. Yet night after night, bent over the table, I wrote in forms explored and sealed by English men hundreds of years before. I saw no contradiction.
It was my great good fortune, while I was still a student at college, to have possessed a copy of an English translation of his great work 'The Sensations of Tone.' As is well known, this was one of Helmholtz's masterpieces.
I obtained a job at the Library of Congress. I loved books, so I felt at home. I was going to end up, I thought, majoring in English and teach at the college level.
Join America taught English, an understanding of the U.S. Constitution, that the Bill of Rights is the ultimate insurance policy for a citizen, and that being a citizen is not an entitlement. And we also taught a bit of capitalism.
There's a thing in the U.K., particularly in London, where it's kind of the idea of subculture and counterculture and the outside and the idea that it's great to be a freak, and the freak always wins. So I think English girls are a lot less scared of being the freak or looking like an idiot.
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.
On our American tour bus, the bunks are a bit taller so that we don't bash our heads. On the English bus, we bash our heads every morning. It's not the best thing to do first thing when you wake up.
I'm trying to find the balance and do, like, 'Spanglish' music or some songs in Spanish and others in English or do a translation.
The conventionality of the English is something I find unattractive - the whole lack of joy in the physical.
My English was limited to vacationing and not really engaging with Americans. I knew 'shopping' and 'eating' English - I could say 'blue sweater,' 'creme brulee,' and 'Caesar salad,' - so I came here thinking I spoke English.
I think English film is very embarrassed by patriotism, generally.
I'd grown up loving English films. I was a huge Monty Python fanatic as a kid.
I majored in English in college, so I read the classic dystopian novels like '1984' and 'Brave New World.'
I'm pretty caring, loyal and loving to those who are close to me. Two of my friends are from school, so I've known them for more than 30 years. My best friend, Paul Fisher, sat next to me in English when I was ten or 11. If you asked him, he'd say I was loyal. I don't think I've changed over the years.
My ambition has always been to work with English and American actors and directors. Those were the movies that I was watching when I was growing up.
A good typeface is like a well-crafted English or Italian suit: it always looks perfect.
Most English people are horrified that I use soap, but I like it - it works for my skin. I try different soaps all the time, but I use very mild ones.
When I was a young teenager, it was all about The Clash for me and that sort of English punk stuff. Then the Clash led me to all these other kinds of music: classic rock, Stevie Wonder, world music, and Brazilian music. I got serious about jazz when I was probably about 14 or 15.
