Quotes About Language

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Why use salty when you can have brackish? It carries a sense of part-water, part-salt, too, just like the sea.

I'm cautious about a lot of words.

The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.

I think we can bring a new retail language to Rockefeller Center that would really change Midtown.

My first single was based around the mishearing of the words 'make believe' - 'I thought she said maple leaves.' That kind of stuff is very central to my music and my life.

You had to learn at a certain age what sarcasm is, you know?

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

Like, even when I speak, I think I speak the same way I write. I kind of see it a certain way, and it leads me to write it exactly how I'm seeing it.

I remember my parents being really on me about speaking in a certain way when I was young, I think because they came from a class that aspired to talk like that.

I think that learning Burmese has to have been one of the most challenging things that I have had to do for a movie.

It is very difficult to work in another language, and it is also very challenging.

I have three championships in a country where I don't speak the language.

Sometimes I am a different character in different languages. I have different enjoyment from them. Sometimes different answers come out of me. Like, I didn't even know that about me. I get to know myself through different languages, actually.

When I came to England, the first director I met was Charles Sturridge, who told me, 'You speak like somebody out of the 1950s.'

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.

You pay your money, you take your choice. I get the audience my language attracts and I lose the ones it repels.

Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.

I have never been someone who chooses a film according to the language. Since I am comfortable with Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, the scope of the film is all that matters to me.

From the beginning, music has been the chosen way to express feelings that words alone can't.

We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant 'big day.'

Chennai is the birthplace of a new language in cinema. The audiences here are the most evolved moviegoers to be found anywhere in India.

For me, cinema's like a language - everyone has their own form of it.