Quotes About English

A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.

The market town of Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire, was a popular 19th - century English spa. Its mineral springs were supposed to be good for you. This was before the invention of bran. In the 20th century, Cheltenham grew into an active municipality.

'XIII' is a spy show. I think the comic book is a little too similar to 'The Bourne Identity.' I tried to take it away from that. I believe there was, many years ago, before the Bourne movies, a lawsuit that made it so they couldn't be published in English.

It looks like things are changing in north London. Tottenham have gone down a road they've never been down before. They've kept their best players and pushed young English ones through. They've started to match Arsenal - who were light years ahead - by building a new stadium.

My dad was a proper old English gentleman, even though he was from the Caribbean. He used to stand up and salute during the Queen's Christmas speech.

When it comes to English stand-up comedy, Indians have only seen the best - Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Cosby and the like. So, when someone claims to be an English stand-up comedian in India, he'd better be very good if he's going to make a life of it.

No matter how irrelevant social class now is, even the most eager egalitarian must be quietly proud that the posh English rose is still an industry standard for peerlessly sophisticated beauty.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Standard English is very imperialistic, controlled, and precise; it's not got a lot of funk or soul to it.

The advance of standard English culture was less assisted by government policy than by the sheer weight, wealth, and number of England's well-established cultural institutions.

I don't think it's fair to say the standard of English coaching is bad. It's more about pathway: how you can get a break and then progress from there. Even at the lowest levels there is impatience now, so you need a bit of luck in terms of the owner or chairman that you work with.

While I was a part of the movement Teach For Change, an NGO which focuses on training government primary and high school students in leadership skills and English language, I realized that the standard of facilities in government schools was very low.

The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.

English dramatic literature is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare; and it is almost inevitable that an English reader should measure the value of other poetic drama by the standards which Shakespeare has already implanted in his mind.

At my school, which was all boys, I played almost exclusively lady parts. When I say lady parts, I mean parts that were ladies. To actually play lady parts would be weird, even by English standards.

I was a halfway-decent-looking English boy who looked nice in a drawing-room standing by a piano.

Polo is a quintessentially English sport. It stands for quality and sophistication and is recognised all over the world as such.

When I can, I watch English games, and not only for the quality of the players on display. I'm hot-headed, and I love the passion that exudes from their packed stands.

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

still I cannot see why, in making a version of (say) Theocritus, one should not use by way of preference those names by which he invariably called them, and which are characteristic of him: why, in turning a Greek author into English, we should begin by turning all the proper names into Latin.

Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.

In 1927, Robert Graves published a little book called *Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language*. He noted a recent decline in the use of foul language by the English, and predicted that this decline would continue indefinitely, until foul language had all but disappeared from the average man's vocabulary. History has not borne him out, to say the least: indeed, I have known economists make more accurate predictions.

training in the writing of good English is indispensable to any learned man who expects to make his learning count for what it ought to count in the effect on his fellow men.

It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!