Quotes About Language

I'm different. I don't speak perfect American. I do have a lilt of an Indian accent. I thought, 'Maybe the world's not okay with what I bring, being Indian.'

I moved to Oklahoma to learn English when I was 16 years old from Colombia for six months; then I moved to New York.

There's still a place for someone to come up with a strong headline, some copy in a commercial that's well written. I'm not saying it was better in the old days; it's just a totally different way of communicating.

The words I use too often are X-rated, something an old man like me shouldn't be talking about anyway.

Numbers of the old people cannot read. Those who can seldom do.

There's a convention in English stuff that if something is more than 100 years old, people have to say 'do not' instead of 'don't. They have to say 'will not' instead of 'won't.' People are speaking in a way that is not accessible or normal. And people didn't ever speak like that.

I use a lot of old-fashioned expressions.

As far as stand-up, a lot of Asians and Chinese are not as apt to stand-up, especially the older generation since they don't even know what stand-up is.

I read one book where the characters never said anything; instead, they spent all their time grunting and bleating and hissing and cooing and growling and chirping and... It was like a menagerie in there. After a while, I wasn't even taking in the rest of the book, because that was all I could see: the dialogue tags.

We were all one, all the languages and all the people and all the states. We are one country and we have the freedom to talk in any language.

I remember I told my mom that I was scared. I asked her, how will I talk to everyone in English? And my mom gave me a dictionary, where I learned one day at a time.

There are Jews who came from 102 countries and speak 81 languages - how do you consolidate them into one nation? This is where I saw my role.

There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

We talk about cancer as a noun, as if it's a one time event: 'I've got cancer.'

The Elizabethan mind wanted and demanded that one word could mean 50 things. What Shakespeare offers us is not ambiguity; it's choices.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects.

I once wrote that the first week in Jerusalem was the hardest week of my life. I was different, other; my clothes were different, as was my language. All of the classes were in Hebrew - science, bible, literature. I sat there not understanding one word. When I tried to speak, everyone would laugh at me.

Online, you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the Internet.

There is no difference working for Hindi or South films; the only difference is the language.

Normally, learning lines is fairly easy for me, but when you add an accent onto that, it adds a complexity that I had not anticipated.

I'm interested in when language fails, when it is opaque.

I love the American openness and use of language; I just don't know how to be that way.

Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema.