Quotes About Language

I don't want to have to be like a Scarlett Johansson - who I have nothing against - but I don't want to have to go on talk shows and pull out every SAT word I've ever learned to prove, like, 'Take me seriously, I am intelligent, I can speak.'

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.

When I was 5 years old, I moved with my mother and brother from Philadelphia to a small town in Florida. People talked more slowly there and said words I had never heard before, like 'ain't' and 'y'all' and 'ma'am.' Everybody knew everybody else. Even if they didn't, they acted like they did.

Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it.

When I was a kid, I hated being talked to as a kid. I don't know if all kids feel that way, but I seem to remember awful things in the crib, something like people doing baby talk in the crib and sticking their big, fat faces in there and scaring me. So I always talk to kids as if they were a person.

I became a playwright and screenwriter. Italian-Americans were my particular specialty. I liked the way they talked. There was something free in it.

There were a lot of kids from Puerto Rico at my high school in Florida; people always assumed I was Puerto Rican. Even now in California, I get talked to on the street in Spanish constantly!

If people ever talked the way advertising sounded, they would be put away.

In the South we experienced, you know, some black kids who gave us a hard time because - cause 'you talk white.' We didn't talk white. We talked fairly proper. Plus, we had a Midwestern accent, so we didn't have a Southern accent, either. So it wasn't really talking white; it was talking different.

I have cousins in North Carolina who talk in that old Southern style of 'yakking,' if you will. All the black men in my life when I was a boy talked that way, and I love that kind of talk.

I didn't always value the ways black people talked. I thought, in order to make art out of it, you had to change it.

On a bus ride through China, my family and I had talked for hours before a police officer boarded to conduct an inspection. My mother and brother couldn't speak Chinese, so they pretended to be deaf and mute, and none of the Chinese passengers said anything, sparing us.

I grew up really kind of mixed up. I lived with my white grandparents and mom and got made fun of a lot because I talked like her.

I had family in Carolina who were very hood and talked differently in this sort of Southern cadence.

President George W. Bush was kind of a goofy tongue-tied dude. Mostly he just mangled the English language. Barack Obama, by contrast, was a smooth talker. The problem is that frequently what he said was just wrong or tendentious.

Good talkers are only found in Paris.

All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

I often find during a day of shooting I will speak in an American accent all day long when I'm doing dialogue. At the end of the day, it often takes an effort when I'm talking to my fiancee to bring my English back just because you're so used to speaking that way.

I like my hands. They do most of the talking.

My accent gets more pronounced when I've been talking to people from Derry.

My English might not be good enough to talk politics but there is no difficulty if we are talking about football.

I want to keep talking about my people and my country in my own language.

My sister and brother and I grew up speaking both languages - French to our father and English to our mother. But when we three kids are talking to each other, we use English.