Quotes About Accents

Much of my playing is rhythmic and choppy; I use a lot of double stops. The wah just accents all those stops and chops and brings out the rhythmic aspect that much more.

How come foreign accents are so sexy? If I say, 'I'm going to the store,' it sounds boring, benign and rudimentary. But if it's said with an accent, it sounds fundamentally cool.

It's fun to do accents; it's fun to do different periods - that's why you become an actor. Because it's fun to be a storyteller and play make-believe.

Policy calmly formulated in public-school accents behind closed doors can manifest itself in very raucous and savage proceedings when translated into action.

It's a bit odd to have a daughter who sounds American.

At my funeral, I want Meryl Streep crying in five different accents.

Somebody sent me a British magazine listing the 20 worst dialects ever done in movies. I was No. 2, with the worst Cockney accent ever done. No. 1 was Sean Connery, because he uses his Scottish brogue no matter what he's playing.

What can often happen when doing accents is that you go too far to one extreme, so it becomes a caricature. It's important to bring an accent back to a natural organic place so you're still speaking like you would speak, just the sound is different. But your rhythms are not.

Accents influence a performance. If you look at Stanislavski, he says work from the in to the out, and I probably overall work the other way. I find an accent and a mood, and that influences the character massively.

in the outer city, the northern accents clamoring around

I'm obsessed with how people talk! Accents, dialects... So whenever I go someplace where an accent is extremely distinct - Minneapolis, New Orleans, Jamaica, Vancouver - I always find myself trying to pick up the subtleties of their patterns.

Behavior is mutable. It changes from place to place. It's like accents, dialect - it varies from one area to another. But there are universal truths about what it means to be a human being. All the other stuff is like applique. Learning that was interesting to me and probably useful for becoming an actor.

Jazz should be recognized as music of the people, based in a lot of accents and melodies. What is jazz but music that people danced to? Jazz has the dynamic thing. I don't think you have to be playing only Charlie Parker licks on your horn or whatever the new version of that is.

I've been to the Bahamas. It's a beautiful country with truly excellent people. When I took a cruise that docked for a couple hours in Nassau, it mostly reminded me of a giant version of my grandmother's neighborhood in Mobile, Alabama... but with better accents.

After only a few seconds the door opened, and I had a very unsettling moment of disorientation. The man who opened the door and stood looking down at us was very nearly a dead ringer for Lurch, the butler on the old Addams Family TV show. He was close to seven feet tall and wore a classic butler's outfit, complete with morning coat. But happily for my sense of unreality, when he spoke to us it was in a high voice with a thick Cuban accent. "Joo rang?" he said. Deborah

You can't live in a dialect without tremendous work. Like any muscle, accents and voices and languages are all formed out of the muscles that we have in our mouths and faces and tongues.

There's a lot of influences that I have from Detroit that are subliminal. I mean, I spent the first 10 years of my life there. My mom and dad were born and raised there, so a lot of that rubbed off on me. When I get angry, sometimes a Detroit accent comes out.

In the battle of substance over flash, few to none of the Al Jazeera correspondents are recognizable to U.S. audiences. Many have foreign names and accents; none have best-selling books atop the list or can be heard pounding their shoes on the nightly infotainment podium.

If I'm playing an Indian in a Hollywood film, I won't do it in any funny Indian accent.

I have always like doing accents; I find it much easier to get into character for me.

I suppose, back in the day, when I was on the stage, I had nothing to lose, and I did the accents.

I love boys with English accents.

I'll gie ye tae the lions for their denners." This threat has no effect upon the imps at all—for they are inured to empty threats—but its effect upon Betty is remarkable. She seizes my hand and cries in accents of dismay, "Oh Mummy, don't let her—don't let her, Mummy!" It takes several minutes to convince Betty that the children's mother has no intention of feeding her offspring to the lions.

What he liked best about these girls was their accents. After that it was that none of them knew about Scarlet. He didn't have to fight any preconceived ideas people might have about him, other than being American, which he apologized for whenever possible.