Quotes About Language

Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.

My characters don't talk necessarily in a normal American way of talking. They talk a little different.

I'm always saying normal things, and people usually understand me, but they're like, 'Where are you from?!'

Most Hindi movies tend to dramatise events. They are very dialogue heavy. Characters don't speak like people normally do in real life.

I normally speak by moving my hands, and I'm very expressive with my face - something Cuban, I guess.

We live in the United States. British settlers founded the first colony in North America. And English is our language.

My father is from North Carolina, and he got rid of his drawl really fast. He's very much about speaking correctly, enunciating in certain ways.

Well, I couldn't speak English before I went to Belfast. So I learned English with a Northern Irish accent.

But I am Northern myself, and there is a certain rhythm of Northern speech that is very comical: that combination of the choice of language and the speech rhythm, which in itself is very funny.

'Uff da,' for the unenlightened, is Norwegian for 'oy vey' and is a common expression in Minnesotese.

I dream in Norwegian, I count in Norwegian so that basically makes me Norwegian now, I suppose.

I'm not good enough to flip in and out of my Brit accent to my American accent.

When we say Tamil, we are not talking of a language but an entire civilisation.

Playing with words is like combining different notes in music.

Have you ever noticed when people stop laughing, they say, 'Oh dear?'

Nothing makes you feel more stupid than learning a new language. You lose your confidence. You want to disappear. Not be noticed. Say as little as possible.

Guys say 'like' all the time, and no one notices it.

I think I've always been drawn to the notion of talk as cinematic.

Years ago, I went to Brazil and fell in love with it. I really like the music, samba, bossa nova, the language and the people.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

I try to approach the film medium as a novelist and the novel medium as a filmmaker on some level. It's that question: Do we think in pictures, or do we think in language? And the novelist believes one thing, and the filmmaker believes another thing - and I'm fascinated by that balance.

Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.

I tell you, once a girl's got a dose of novels she's a pushover for iambic pentameter.

I fell in love with words in all languages, and I read everything I could find, particularly myths and legends and histories and archeology and any novels.