Quotes About Language

People are possibly not spelling 'Leicester' correctly everywhere round the globe, but they are at least saying it correctly now.

When you say something or sing something enough times, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's almost like casting spells. I don't mean necessarily in the flighty, 'I'm going to go buy a cloak with a hood now' way.

'Donde Estaras,' it is like a classic reggaeton, and we just added some Southern spice to bring it to 2018. But I wanted to go back to the roots of reggaeton, that type of reggaeton that makes you just feel good. You don't know what we are saying but that OK because 'Donde Estas' is where are you at but 'Donde Estaras' is where are you going to be.

Scientifically speaking, if I say something, or it gets misquoted, or people put a spin on it... I mean, are you interested, really, in what people are saying?

I really never thought I was that good at film. And honestly still don't. My strength is language. My background is monologues and a certain kind of Brechtian spin on theater.

Rhe language of politics is experienced by most as spin with the assumption of dishonesty.

I believe that music is a spiritual language. My everyday self is pretty mundane and boring, but when I'm making music it allows for me to communicate a kind of transcendence that I can't communicate otherwise.

You write a book, it's out for however many years, and with the passing of time, you're not the same person. I'm not the same person I was when I wrote those books; I'm not even the same person I was when I started writing 'Beg.' I had many shifts spiritually, and one of them was in the use of language.

I think maybe since there isn't a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don't understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out.

I learned Punjabi before I learned English in spite of the fact that I was born in Canada.

In spite of the fact that Russian is very tough, I think that I can find enough strength in myself to learn it.

In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

Assonance is not the enemy of rhyme. It helps us to respect rhyme, which has been spoiled by mechanical use.

My grandfather spoke fluent Spanish and I have family members who speak fluent Spanish.

If anything, I've thought of myself as Scandinavian. Particularly, Danish. We spoke English at home.

My father was an Episcopal minister, and for 14 years my family lived in China, in a city called Wuchang. We four children spoke Chinese before we spoke English. We left when the communists came, in the early 1930s. I was about 5 years old.

My first language is both English and Spanish. My mom was raised in Los Angeles, so with her we spoke English, but my father was born in Cuba, so with him we spoke Spanish.

I went by myself to Hollywood, I spoke no English, every day I had to go to school.

I never really grew up being political or Labour. It was just a realisation that where you were born mattered. That how you spoke mattered... who you knew mattered.

I spoke English at school and Spanish at home, and I'm always eating Dominican food, listening to Dominican music.

I learned my English from Keith Spurgeon. He had some small children, and I was young, too, and so we spoke the language together, and it was fantastic.

Although I feel very French, a part of my heart is in the States. When my brother and I arrived, we didn't really speak any English, and when we left, that's all we spoke when we played together. It was just a beautiful place to grow up.

I spoke in Tamil at home and ate dosa and idli.

As far as getting work, no one thought I spoke English. It was absolutely ridiculous. I'd show up at a meeting and they'd be like, 'Oh my God, you speak English! That's so cool.' They didn't really know what to do with me.