Quotes About Language

I think Australians like a bit of vulgarity.

Everybody in Spain is sick of me. But in America, there's curiosity about the new kid on the block who doesn't speak English very well. The attention makes me feel vulnerable, which is something I hadn't felt in a while. But I like it.

The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution.

It helps me to learn things in different languages, even if it's just phonetically, and to make myself vulnerable to other audiences by trying to reflect back to them the genius of their own cultures, and to do that, oftentimes, in new jazz settings, new arrangements. It's a way to show respect.

Most of the dramatism in Wagner comes from a very close link between the music and the language of the text. So much of the expressivity of Wagner's music dramas comes from the singers' capacity to play with the sound of the language. This kind of thing you can do very well in concert performance.

I actually used to make these little plays. I would stand there, and I would act out where I was dying or something. I would make them sit there and watch all my plays. I would be talking in gibberish language, like I was talking in a different language, and my parents would be like, 'Oh that was great!' and I'd be like, 'Wait, it's not done!'

The first time I was in London, I went to an English greasy spoon to get some breakfast and realised that all the waiters were speaking Italian. That's when it hit me what an international city this is.

The battle between server and servee is as ancient as it is well disguised, and it follows, therefore, that waiters have developed a private lingo that allows them to mock, complain, or simply entertain themselves.

In English, my name means hope. In Spanish, it means too many letters. It means sadness. It means waiting. It is like the number nine, a muddy color.

There's a big difference between when I'm Tom and when I'm Conchita. Conchita uses very proper German; Tom talks in an Austrian dialect. Conchita gets mad if she is kept waiting; Tom is lazy.

I'm one of those idiots; when I'm working in America, I wake up with an American accent and stay with it all day till make-up comes off.

My parents were always Welsh-speaking and very proud of Wales.

I don't know, 'Zorro' was just so great for me because, knowing where I came from, everyone spoke Spanish to me, like, forever after that. And I'm, like, from Wales.

I'll move back to Wales if and when I have children. I want them to speak the language I speak, but I love living in London. It's my favourite city in the whole world. I love it because it's not England, it's London.

Nor do I think that any other nation than this of Wales, nor any other language, whatever may hereafter come to pass, shall on the day of severe examination before the Supreme Judge, answer for this corner of the earth.

When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it.

The words walked right out of my mouth.

I don't say I was 'proceeding down a thoroughfare;' I say I 'walked down the road'. I don't say I 'passed a hallowed institute of learning;' I say I 'passed a school'.

There were about 400 heads of state from countries all over the world. I walked out and played 'Hotel California,' and everybody in the place gave me a standing ovation, and half of those countries don't even speak English.

Scott Walker is going to tell people the truth - not with bombastic and self-congratulatory language, but in that endearing Midwestern way.

'Pootie Tang' may be raw and slovenly - hey, it often is raw and slovenly - but it succeeds as a laugh getter because of the spot-on satirical notes. You might say that the movie walks it like it talks it; I'm not sure what Pootie would say.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.

I do speak a bit of Bengali.

After doing the Bengali 'Antar Mahal,' I felt I should work with all Indian languages.