Quotes About Language

People put stock in someone being in a 'girl group,' but we don't say that a band is a 'man group.'

Even though you picture Russians as stoic, their language is really poetic.

We fear the arrival of immigrants that we have drawn here with the wealth we stole from them. For much of the rest of the world we must be the focus of bitter amusement, characters in a satire we don't understand. It is British people that don't learn languages, or British history. Britain is the true scrounger, the true criminal.

People in Russia learned English off the Beatles. People in Japan learned English off the Stone Roses. Noel Gallagher says music can't change the world, but the Roses made him want to start a group, so it changed his world.

Bollywood is not a stepping stone to the West. I am extremely picky and in no hurry to sign a Hollywood film. I am only greedy for great roles; language and country is no barrier. And yes, I'll always be a Hindi film star first.

For many, the icon of the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, that administrative by-product of the Greek imperial adventure in Africa.

I read 'Sabella or The Blood Stone' by Tanith Lee, which was hugely influential to me. I love Tanith's writing. She's just really lyrical, beautiful use of language.

I think we've lost the idea that politicians are part of the humanities. And we think of them as part of a natural science tradition, and we don't expect them to have the contact with literature, with history, with the richness of descriptive language that the humanities have always stood for. And I think that's a great loss.

I grew up cursing a lot. It felt natural. My parents told me to stop.

Acting in different languages doesn't stop you from growing; on the contrary, for an artiste, it helps a lot.

I think when I first started out, I had a kind of an exuberance about language, comedy, narrative leaps that... stopped just short of non sequiturs. And I'm much more cautious now.

One of the places the full stop is really being revised in a really fundamental way is on the Internet. You look at the Internet or any instant messaging exchange - anything that is a fast dialogue taking place. People simply do not put full stops in unless they want to make a point.

It's a daily miracle to see a child grow and develop all the senses and language and speech and faculties, and they're so much fun and they're so delightful and they're so innocent. It just stops your heart every time; I can't get enough of it.

Without form, communication stops... without form, you have everybody burbling on to themselves, whenever and however, things that no one else can understand and - rightly - no one else is interested in.

'Starcraft' was never designed to support multi-byte languages. In order to support more complicated languages like Korean or Chinese, you need two bytes of storage and 'Starcraft' only had one byte.

How come foreign accents are so sexy? If I say, 'I'm going to the store,' it sounds boring, benign and rudimentary. But if it's said with an accent, it sounds fundamentally cool.

I like to read Bengali novels and short stories. I am not that fond of reading English books, as I don't have a connect with it.

Film is the only language I speak, and I have been lucky to be involved in some great stories. You don't want to preach to people, but you want them to think about why things are the way they are, the history that is there as well as the possibilities.

I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When 'American Buffalo' came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, 'How dare he use that kind of language!' Of course I'm alienating the public! That's what they pay me for.

I prefer to speak of 'interdimensionals' rather than 'extraterrestrials' because the latter has connotations of 'little green men' and all the other cliche responses. Nor does it tell the full story.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

A story begins and it always passes from the subjunctive to the declarative. And Italians don't seem to care about making a fine distinction between that which is speculation and that which is fact.

I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story.

When I discovered that, through acting, you can speak a beautiful language aloud and have a relationship to language that isn't one that's just eyes-to-page, pen-to-page - it's one that's full-bodied, full-voiced, full-heart... it really opened my heart and made me feel like I could be a storyteller.