Quotes About Language

By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future.

In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.

Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.

I speak three languages - English is my third language - so I take my time with lyrics. It's almost like having a conversation with somebody. If it's really important, you want to think about what you wanna say with that person, especially if it's for the last time.

When you used to be able to express yourself as an adult in your own language, or as I can do in English, for instance, it's sometimes hard to switch back to very simple talking, like I am forced to do in Finnish. So a real conversation, when I really wanna tell something, I can't do it in Finnish.

When I listen to an American singer, I wanna listen to his music in his language, because he's more spontaneous - he's more natural - and I need his point of view. And our point of view here in Brussels is French and Flemish.

I'm not as articulate as I'd wanna be.

If you want to get your point across, you gotta cuss.

I thought Mia Hansen-Love was a true auteur, and I always wanted to work with her. Mia's empathy for her characters and her ability to use the language of cinema to communicate real human depth is extraordinary. She's a humanist.

If I wanted to show family or friends content that had loads of cursing in it, I wouldn't be as proud of that.

I think the biggest difficulty is that when I'm here in America, there's a necessity of using English, so I really have a great sense of really wanting to learn, but unfortunately when I head back to Japan, the necessity vanishes and so does my enthusiasm about learning.

Basically, I learned to read by reading 'Peanuts,' just wanting to know what they were saying.

We've been in business together ever since we were children, so back in the day, there were so many references to 'your dad.' Rather than wanting to sound totally hickified and go, 'Well, my daddy said,' we would refer to him as 'Phil.'

In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limitation that I have to work around and I have to use it to my favor. So, yes, that's why I end up wanting to do more things in Latin America.

Wanting to be understood by an audience that didn't know Russian, I tried to paint musical pictures by emphasizing the phrasing, using voice color more boldly, and varying the shade and nuance.

Basically, I learned to read by reading 'Peanuts,' just wanting to know what they were saying. I was 4 or 5 or whatever. I think it's a fairly common story.

Having arrived in London to seek refuge during the civil war in Sudan, where I was born, the thing I'm most proud of is having totally evolved. I came here not knowing how to speak English, but I went to school and learned; I adapted to this new culture.

I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.

I know now that gang warfare is not the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There is violence in gang violence, but there is no conflict. It is not 'about something.' It is the language of the despondent and traumatized.

Some people call it global warming; some people call it climate change. What is the difference?

I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.

When I came to the last line of 'Car Crash While Hitchhiking,' I read it as a pitiless statement of indifference: a refusal to warn the family of their impending collision, a refusal to help when miraculously spared, a refusal to act on the empathy hiding behind the story's language.

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice.