Quotes About Language

When I'm studying English I love to watch 'Friends' or 'Nikita.'

All Italians speak Spanish without studying.

I'd love to spend a year at the Sorbonne studying French culture.

After years of studying French in school, one of my professors said he'd really appreciate it if I didn't take any more French.

I was brought up on music hall, and at the same time, I was studying Greek at the age of 12.

The way the educational system in Russia works is studying a foreign language is part of the program, so by the time you get to the age of 10, you pick up another language. I speak a bit of Russian, a bit of English, a bit of Spanish a bit of French.

I love to learn, and I started doing a lot of studying of Spanish-style music and really started getting into it and how it is just a completely different form of guitar playing. It is just like if you started speaking in a different language like Japanese or something. It is something that you have to study and work at a lot.

I had to do a lot of studying 'cause I had to learn new languages all the time. So it was a little bit painful watching other kids play outside, and I'm stuck at home learning something.

It's soo freaking hard studying all night for your exams when you know there is no hope of clearing the dreaded Hindi paper.

I just started studying opera - very, very much as hobby - and for some reason I've been gravitating toward French composers, like a lot of Debussy and Faure. I find it a really sinuous and spooky language to sing in.

So Mandarin, I picked it up, I spent a year in Beijing studying but then when you don't use it, languages, you just kinda forget it all.

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

I'm just very obsessed with Japanese stuff in general.

Once I became interested in China, I flew to Beijing in 1996 to spend half a year studying Mandarin. The city stunned me.

If a kid is reading a book about someone who looks like them but doesn't talk like them, we stunt their growth by dissing them.

I'll call somebody 'dumb' or 'stupid' if they make a dumb or stupid play. I don't know any other word for it, and if they don't like the word, that's too bad.

You know, so many people say TV makes you stupid. But it had the complete opposite effect on me. It kept me from having a really bad Southern accent.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

My speech impediment wasn't a stutter but it was dropping several letters that I just could not say for several years, most specifically the 'r' sound.

It has always seemed a cruel joke to me that the very word 'stutter' is difficult for many stutterers to pronounce. It is onomatopoeic, an imitation of the halting, repetitive sound made by people with this speech dysfunction.

I have struggled all my life with my stuttering. Not to mention all my other speech impediments. I think I have every language disorder known to speech pathologists.

I do speak Mandarin, and I also relate to the hunger that China has for culture and architecture and style.

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.