Quotes About English

My parents are huge influences on me. My mother was an English teacher. My father played professional rugby and coached rugby for the Irish rugby team.

I made loads of English and Irish friends at university and all they wanted to do was have a good time.

'Friends' is easy to dismiss, but it's really good television - the art with which those actors play with comedy shouldn't be denigrated. And they also know how to play irony, which I think a lot of English actors might find quite difficult.

I'm not a monarchist. But I'm English. And I have an irrational emotion for my country.

English dialogue is the best in the world. So dry and direct. The Italian language is beautiful, but it is too literary.

English football is very different from Italian; it's more physical, and matches are always very open.

I enjoy the honesty of English football, because nobody gives up, and almost all the best players are here. Italian football is at the bottom because of all those scandals. Their league is not very interesting.

My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.

People say the English players don't come to Italy because they look down on Serie A, but that's just not true.

It's funny, I started by making fake American movies, 'The Transporter' and stuff like that. I was shooting in France, but everything was in English. But then afterwards, I was looking at real French movies like the Jacques Audiard movies.

I have never been to Jamaica and in footballing terms, I feel English because this is where I grew up and played all of my football. That is not to say I don't have immense pride in my Jamaican heritage - I certainly do.

Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck made me an Anglophile. I listened to English and Irish artists as a kid, and they were way louder, heavier, and faster than the traditional blues that I was listening to.

I love all the shoe shops in Covent Garden. Laura Lee Jewellery on Monmouth Street for delicate gold jewellery. Every time I get a part in an English movie, I buy myself a piece of jewellery from there.

Joe Hart has come in for a bit of criticism, but it's only because he's the England goalkeeper, and he's not got any competition. It's always been like that; it's just the way the English media works. Joe Hart is a tough cookie, and he won't listen to any of that.

I am delighted to be joining a big English club. I know very well the quality that Chelsea has.

The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke.

The concept of modernity in literary history was also related to the relation each Indian language and literature developed with English. Sanskrit and Persian literary models were labelled as traditional and medieval, and those found in English, irrespective of any period, as modern (page 22)

A curious fact surfaces in reading these Elizabethan cookbooks. The English did not thicken their sauces with flour. According to some scholars, it was actually a French chef, François Pierre de la Varenne, who first used that method in his 1661 cookbook, Le Cuisinier François. The English chefs of the time clearly shunned La Varenne's method of thickening, and it does not enter into English cookery books for at least fifty years.

It didn't occur to him to make allowances for the long English twilight. That twilight gave to the landscape a curious effect of suspended life. It cast upon everything (or was that, perhaps, the beer?) an eerie, magical bloom. Every mile that he went - and now he was hurrying - he felt surer and surer that he was on the verge of some shattering experience.

Verona has long haunted the English imagination.

Today, I live in France. We have been made utterly welcome by our French neighbours, who, if the subject arises, can only scratch their heads in utter bemusement at why we would want to leave this union. I try to explain, but in order to really understand, you have to be British. Or rather, not British, but a certain English sort – that peculiar, insular, self-aggrandising mentality that cannot see past the White Cliffs of Kent. I have never understood that,

The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp, or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself....Society swarmed with exaggerated characters; it contained little else.

Where shall we look for standard English but to the words of a standard man?

Madame Merle was very appreciative; she liked almost everything, including the English rain. There is always a little of it, and never too much at once, she said; and it never wets you, and it always smells good.