Quotes About Language

Although several actors have worked in films down South, I feel unsure of whether I will be able to emote and act as exuberantly as I do in Hindi and Bengali films.

When I was in high school and college, I thought everybody could think in pictures. And my first inkling to my thinking was even different was when I was in college and I read an article about, you know, some scientist said that the caveman could not have designed tools until they had language.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

What is unusual about Earth is that language, literally, has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us.

Word books traditionally focus on unusual and quirky items. They tend to ignore the words that provide the skeleton of the language, without which it would fall apart, such as 'and' and 'what,' or words that provide structure to our conversation, such as 'hello.'

When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson.

In my dictionary, and everyone's dictionary in the 1970s, the word 'queer' did mean strange and unusual. There was no slur to it.

I used to go through the dictionary looking for unusual but nontechnical words. At one time, I thought the greatest word was 'jejune' and I would throw it into every piece because something about it appealed to me.

There's nothing unusual about a single language dying. But what's going on today is extraordinary when we compare the situation to what has happened in the past. We're seeing languages dying out on a massive scale.

Penelope Fitzgerald never fails to surprise: her language is clever and elegant, her settings are unusual, her characters are unpredictable, and I am always caught out by a line or moment which makes me laugh out loud.

I can't stand musicals, but I love dance because it's a corporeal language that can be so rich and sometimes so unusual.

I can't say that I know the lexicon as intimately as a lot of people, so I may be unworthy of being called a Trekkie. That would be doing a disservice to the people who really are Trekkies.

I'm a parrot. I can pick up an accent and just do it.

I have Spanish ancestry and, indeed, speak the language, up to a point.

I knew the profanity used up and down my street would not go over the air... So I trained myself to say 'Holy Cow' instead.

Telling your story out loud is the way human beings communicate. We don't normally think up words, translate how to spell them and then move our fingers up and down over this randomly arranged set of keys to make the same letters appear on a screen.

I was born in Paris, and my mother was a French teacher, but then I rebelled against my upbringing and studied Spanish in school. So now I just speak bad French and bad Spanish.

Unfortunately, in my home, we didn't speak Arabic; it was a mixed culture. My mother played a dominant role in our educational upbringing, and we grew up as part and parcel of Belize's culture.

I have a blog in Chinese, which you can follow, Chinese signs. But I don't even update at all, often I don't.

I keep myself updated about films in other languages.

Everyone must know by now that the aim of Scrabble is to gain the moral high ground, the loser being the first player to slam the board shut and upset all the letters over the floor.

Something I realized when I moved to America: people get these general American accents, but when they get angry or upset or excited, their original accents come out. It's something I noticed with my manager, because he's from New York, and the first time he got angry, he suddenly had this accent.

I have been known to have four-letter words fly out of my mouth when I'm upset.

I remember learning new words, trying to figure out what common things like cider, finding myself upset that my parents couldn't help me understand this new culture, that it was up to me to interpret for them as well as myself.