Quotes About Language

Why isn't there a special name for the tops of your feet?

If you could literally 'rid' yourself of your problems by voicing them, I'd be all for it. But since that isn't so, why not reserve the spoken word for functional interactions and witticisms, if not declarations of love?

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

People say 'Why would you learn Dutch? Nobody speaks it. Why not French?' Even the Dutch say that to me! I say because I want to live here, I think it's only common courtesy that I speak the language.

I think a broader audience is really amazing. If there's no need for curse words or darkness, why go there? Why not make it PG?

It doesn't matter to me where am I going. Language is not a barrier for me, I can go anywhere with my craft, so why not Hollywood?

The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.

When I went to school, I didn't know a lick of English, but it was okay because there were so many immigrants in the area, a lot of the kids didn't speak a lick of English, either. It was normal to have a wicked accent.

I'm obsessed with 'Wicked', and I'd love to play Nala in 'The Lion King'. Some of the songs from 'The Lion King' are performed in my native tongue, so when the cast performed an extract from the show in 'Strictly' in the language I grew up with, it made me cry.

I like 'Yabai!' That just rolls off the tongue. It means sick, wicked in Japanese.

One superlatively important effect of wide reading is the enlargement of vocabulary which always accompanies it.

I took the first James Kelman novel, 'The Bus Conductor Hines', home to my dad. I thought, 'My dad will like this; it's written in Scots.' But my dad said: 'I can't read that.' He was reading James Bond and John le Carre. That was part of what attracted me to crime - the idea of getting a wide audience.

According to my wife, my use of vocabulary is wide and varied.

To cover politics in Washington allows you to live in the very, very wide gap between what the actual truth is, and how people are trying to manipulate the truth. They speak in the language of spin, obsequiousness, obfuscation. The meta of politics is just this endless source of material that can shed light on the psychology of the process.

If your film is in English, it makes it that much easier to get a wide release.

Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn't occur to people - or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.

What got me really excited about Tylko is the fact that it bridges the gap between tradition and technology. It expands the designer's ability to create a language, to create ideas, to create a set of proportions, a set of details, and to apply those across a really wide range of applications.

Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.

Among the various vernaculars that are spoken in different parts of India, there is one that stands out strongly from the rest, as that which is most widely known. It is Hindi. A man who knows Hindi can travel over India and find everywhere Hindi-speaking people.

Baahubali... ' has been accepted widely amongst Hindi cinema-goers. So this shows that language is becoming less important.

In film lyrics, I avoid Persianised words because they are not widely understood.

Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

I've done two remakes, 'Rowdy Rathore' and 'Son of Sardaar,' and I see nothing wrong with it. The originals were in a language that not everyone understands, so when you're making it in another language, you can reach a much wider audience. That's how I look at it.