Quotes About Language

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.

I didn't speak English until I came to Pittsburgh.

I once had a story editor ask me not to use the word 'placenta.' I wanted to say: 'Now tell me again how you got here?' Oh, right, an angel of God placed you into the bill of the stork.

I was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the United States with my family when I was 4. I spent most of my childhood in Chicago. My elementary school had no program in English as a second language, so I was placed in a class for students with speech impediments.

Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

All British people have plain names, and that works pretty well over there.

The Constitution isn't written in Chinese, Swahili or Sanskrit. It's in plain English.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.

I'm not very good with the numbers and details and the language of contracts. I just want to play football.

As with Cesc Fabregas, some players who go and play for foreign clubs improve on a cultural level. It makes them grow on many levels; intellectually, because you have to learn a new language and adapt to another culture, and on a footballing level too.

Jill Eisenstadt is a writer of many admirable gifts. Foremost among them are a sharp eye for people, a playful love of language, and, it's probably safe to assume, nearly boundless energy.

I don't know grammar but I do know that I love playing games on my phone.

My mind jumbles things, reassembles them, and plays with words without even being asked.

One of the characteristics of plays that are made into films is that they can be very talky.

But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice.

I've done a lot of plays before where I had to do a New York accent, but never a Philly one before. They do the rhotic 'r' - where you say the 'r' - where most New Yorkers don't.

If a person plays dissonance long enough, it will sound like consonance. It's a language that was alien and then it's less and less alien as it continues to live.

One of the great things that playwright A.R. Gurney does in 'Sylvia' is he gives language to the emotional gestures and energy that our dogs give to us when they're communicating.

Please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics.' There are people with schizophrenia.

For years, I'd go to the movies and see guys doing Boston accents and think, 'Oh please, God, I hope I never have to do that.'

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that 'fetch' is now the word I want to use to mean 'cool.'

I discovered that it's not really about the language. It's about how the words are pronounced and the delivery. We have plenty of good English-speaking comedians. It's O.K. if I have my accent, my gestures, my way of speaking.