I first watched 'Adhe Adhure' in college. I loved it, and it stayed with me ever since. I decided that I would some day direct this play - not in English, but in Hindi.
English people are famous for never speaking out but only saying what they really feel about you behind your back. Americans believe the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I like exploring those, er, differences in national snippiness.
Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.
The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.
My early influences were the Shadows, who were an English instrumental band. They basically got me into playing and later on I got into blues and jazz players. I liked Clapton when he was with John Mayall. I really liked that period.
The American Revolution was, in fact, a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians.
We have a very long legal system with the European Union, and we're English speaking.
If you think of India in the 1980s, there weren't many writers in English around. The ones that were there, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad.
The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
I'm very English. I'm white. I mean, I'm so pale. With spray tans they start peeling and start getting really dirty looking.
We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.
The NHS is the closest thing the English have to a religion.
Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.
Some of the substance of English words, I just don't understand at all because the culture's so strange to me.
I can read Middle English stories, Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory, but once I start moving in the direction of contemporary fantasy, my mind begins to take over.
Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?
One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.
I ended up doing four or five plays in college and being an English major with my thesis in language acquisition, which I was planning to study in graduate school.
The English (it must be owned) are rather a foul-mouthed nation.
My mother never learned English, but in Russia, the greatest thing was to give a child to the arts. And so they gave me to the ballet.
Would it be possible to stand still on one spot more majestically - while simulating a triumphant march forward - than it is done by the two English Houses of Parliament?
There are reasons for believing that the English increase will far surpass others, and that the diffusion of the United States will ultimately produce the general population of America.
First in France, first in Romania - by land and sea to the English and Paris. Marvellous deeds by that great alliance. The violent brute will lose Lorraine.
I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.
Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.
I grew up having two different perspectives - one in English, one in Spanish. Two different cultures, very different - but I think that, to me, it's one. I'm just as American as I feel Latin.
If I can't find a project that I'm really interested in, I'll just go back to college where I've been studying art history and French. I'm also going to study English and philosophy - the whole curriculum!
The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me... by newspapers and the Bible.
I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.
What's always a challenge for me is that my Spanish is not the level of my English. Nor do I read in Spanish the way I read in English.
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
I've concentrated for a long time on English films because I've got two kids but my oldest son is 11 and I think I'm going to be away for about four months of year now.
I'm three quarters Scottish, but I sound English. I don't really see British as a race.
I translated Beatles songs for my English class.
Many European guys go to the N.H.L. at a young age, even without knowing English. But they quickly adapt to new conditions, another game, a new country. They are also young, receptive, can move mountains.
