Quotes About Language

The charge of being ambiguous and indefinite may be brought against every human composition, and necessarily arises from the imperfection of language. Perhaps no two men will express the same sentiment in the same manner and by the same words; neither do they connect precisely the same ideas with the same words.

Italian is the language of song. German is good for philosophy and English for poetry. French is best at precision; it has a rigour to it.

I really like acting in French. It's actually quite different for me, from acting in English. It's fun acting in a foreign language. You're liberated or freed from preconceptions.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

Youthquake' wasn't an entirely predictable choice for Oxford's Word of 2017. It hasn't been on the lips of an entire nation, nor is it new. But it amply fulfilled the criteria Oxford requires for selection.

I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books.

I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.

Racism always exists cheek by jowl with, inside, and alongside culture and class. As a rule, it is inseparable from them. That is why, for example, food, language and names assume such importance in racial prejudice.

It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.

I was 11 when I started Latin - not like boys, who start early at prep school. At 14, you had to choose whether to start Greek and drop German, but my mum made a fuss, and I took Latin, Greek, French, and German at O-level, which meant I didn't do much science.

Since I had gone to a Marathi-language school, I had to take elocution classes as preparation for my part as Kasturba.

In Malayalam, I can improvise, and acting is easy because I think in Malayalam, but for 'Velaikkaran,' I had to prepare for a role, which is a first for me.

Shakespeare is a permanent presence in the English letters.

I use not casual phrases but imagistic phrases that create a rhythm of natural presence.

I think Donald Trump's language and the way that he presents things oftentimes is not good.

The literary culture, if you examine it, the high literary culture is that which preserves the government and you know it's really the talk for those who have.

There are times when we need to think beyond business and look at preserving culture and languages.

The spirit of logical analysis should in practice blend with the practical pressure for the adoption of some form of international language, but it should not allow itself to be stampeded by it.

The old injunction 'Don't talk with your mouth full' is based on the presumption that, however multifunctional a mouth may be, it should only perform one job at a time. Humans have found a way around this limitation in the form of food writing.

He is very nice and down to earth despite all his money. In public, Roman likes to pretend he doesn't speak English but he is actually good to talk to.

Lots of middle class people are running around pretending to be Cockney.

If you take away a lot of the pretension and grandness from Shakespeare, a true poeticism is revealed.

I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.

I think people are really picky about English accents. When a Brit comes over here and kind of does an OK American accent, everyone's like, 'You were great! Fantastic!' But in England, even if you were doing a pretty good accent, they're like, 'But where are you from?' 'London.' 'What part of London?' Accents are really precious over there.