Top 100 American English Quotes
#1. That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.
Roy Blount Jr.
#2. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#3. When I'm on television, I'm talking to millions of people, so the conversation is totally different. My words are different. My diction is different because now I'm really talking American English and not homeboy English.
Keyshawn Johnson
#4. In standard American English, the word with the most gradations of meaning is probably run. The Random House unabridged dictionary offers one hundred and seventy-eight options, beginning with "to go quickly by moving the legs more rapidly than at a walk" and ending with "melted or liquefied." In
Stephen King
#5. The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.
Camille Paglia
#6. I'm a multi-lingual Kundalini-dancing shapeshifter to the 69th degree.
I know French, Italian, Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Greek, Latin, Gaelic, Scottish, English, and American English.
I'm cunninglingual.
Sienna McQuillen
#7. American English is essentially English after having been wiped off with a dirty sponge.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#8. I grew up watching foreign programs - American, English, Mexican, and very little Kenyan. 'The Color Purple' was the first time I saw people who looked like me.
Lupita Nyong'o
#9. All messages from Satan are played forward and are in standard American English.
George Carlin
#10. What are you? German? American? English? Greek? Japanese? Turkish? French? Indian? Chinese? These are not real, these are virtual! You are human! This is what is real!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#11. American English is the greatest influence of English everywhere.
Robert Burchfield
#12. All I can say in my solitude is, May Heaven's rich blessing come down on every one - American, English, Turk - who will help to heal this open sore of the world.
David Livingstone
#13. If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.
John Keegan
#14. I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
Ken Bruen
#15. Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.
Alan Siegel
#16. During the settling of the American colonies, it was said that the Spaniards would first build a church, the Dutch would first build a fort and the English a tavern. Welcome to Charleston, an English colony founded in 1670.
Mark R. Jones
#17. Canada could have enjoyed: English government, French culture, and American know-how. Instead it ended up with: English know-how, French government, and American culture.
John Robert Colombo
#18. We should not blur the lines between legal and illegal immigrants. Millions of people around the world have gone through the process to come here legally and they followed the rules that required them to pay a fee, learn English, and learn about American history and government.
Ken Calvert
#19. American audiences are affected by what the English people think.
Chita Rivera
#20. I was born in Mumbai, but I grew up in England, and then my adulthood has been in the States. I'm an American stuffed with an English person with an Indian person inside. I feel like those things kind of inform me in some way, which I think helps me as an actor.
Aasif Mandvi
#21. I think now, more than anytime I can remember, bands are sounding pretty similar whether they're English or American, from Manchester or London ... or Leeds or Welsh or Irish.
Graham Coxon
#22. I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.
Christopher Hitchens
#23. I quite like American music, like The Fray - I'm a massive fan of them - and The Killers. I also like more acoustic stuff like Ed Sheeran; I like this English songwriter James Morrison and another singer called Ben Howard.
Louis Tomlinson
#24. The title song of David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.
Jon Landau
#25. I believe we are being dishonest with language minority groups if we tell them they can take full part in American life without learning the English language.
S.I. Hayakawa
#26. I think in the past, around the time that method acting became so prevalent, it used to be that American actors were thought to be the kind that would work more from the inside out, and that the English actors worked more from the outside in.
Annette Bening
#27. I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.
Allegra Huston
#29. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#30. If you write "judgement" you should also write "colour" and "tyre.
Paul Brians
#31. Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised 'costumed Dickensian characters.'
Matthew Pearl
#32. Henry James said there isn't any difference between "the English novel" and "the American novel" since there are only two kinds of novels at all, the good and the bad.
Eudora Welty
#33. It took me a year to really learn the American lingo. I really feel for people who are coming here and don't speak English at all. It must be hell.
Helen Reddy
#34. He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.
Robert M. Pirsig
#35. Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer advantages.
Matthew Pearl
#36. In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.
Frederick Lenz
#37. We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer's accent. That's just pretending to be something you ain't.
Joe Strummer
#38. A well known director wouldn't take the chance on casting me for an American role after he discovered that I was English. Some time later, he expressed his regret that he hadn't taken the chance with me.
Marsha Thomason
#39. Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.
Leslie Fiedler
#40. The true sovereign is not the American president nor the English king, but the Lord of the Second Advent.
Sun Myung Moon
#41. What, then, is this new man, the American? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race, now called Americans, have arisen.
J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur
#42. American politicians do anything for money ... English politicians take the money and won't do anything.
Stephen Leacock
#43. There is a core simplicity to the English language and its American variant, but it's a slippery core.
Stephen King
#44. You're in Ireland the summer after you left college and you're drinking at a pub near the castle where every day bus loads of English and American tourists come to kiss the Blarney Stone.
Chuck Palahniuk
#45. It was hard for an American to understand the contented acceptance by English men and women of permanent places in the lowest social rank.
Virginia Gildersleeve
#46. My American strength coach said he liked me better before I could speak English.
Yao Ming
#47. I learned English at school, or at least that's how it started. Also, in Holland - as opposed to some other European countries - we don't dub anything, so as a kid growing up, always watching English and American movies in their original language really helped.
Michiel Huisman
#48. Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with as it is the most difficult for the English to avoid.
Gore Vidal
#49. The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me ... by newspapers and the Bible.
Van Wyck Brooks
#50. I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.
Siri Hustvedt
#51. American hunting is quite different from English hunting because we don't hunt to kill. Even if I wanted to kill a fox, I couldn't. They're too smart and they have too many ways to escape me, whereas they don't in England.
Rita Mae Brown
#52. America has had an influence on me, as has going out with a Cuban-American guy and having lots of American friends. But I am still fundamentally British and speak with a British accent and feel very English.
Lily Cole
#53. I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
Daniel Alarcon
#55. Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.
Mignon McLaughlin
#56. He [P.G.Wodehouse] is I believe, the only man living who speaks with equal fluency the American and English languages.
Max Eastman
#57. My biggest entertainment in Moscow was to go to the subway and watch people. When American students visited, I watched them; I learned English from them.
Roustam Tariko
#58. On our American tour bus, the bunks are a bit taller so that we don't bash our heads. On the English bus, we bash our heads every morning. It's not the best thing to do first thing when you wake up.
Liam Payne
#59. Of course I wrote most of the Constitution myself. I remember hesitating for a long time over the US presidential system. But it wouldn't have done - we were too trained in English democracy to sit down under a dictatorship which is what the American system really is.
Eamon De Valera
#60. 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.
Andrzej Wajda
#61. Even though I'm English, I've all my life been heavily exposed to American television and culture in general.
Dominic West
#62. You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?
Christopher Hitchens
#63. It is said that the American vocabulary has declined by half in the past few decades. It's a tragic instance of desertification following upon monocultural commodity production, the clear-cutting of written and spoken English.
Stephanie Mills
#64. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
Michael Eric Dyson
#65. Clothes, whips, reading material," the customs officer had summarized, in Spanish and English, to the young American. "Just the bare essentials!" Edward Bonshaw
John Irving
#66. If somebody's going to earn citizenship, with whatever other hurdles are put in the way, at the end of the road they should be able to speak English, they should be able to read English, they should have some knowledge of American history,
Rudy Giuliani
#67. You speak very good English for an American.
Nico
#68. I do believe, given the heritage of Al Jazeera itself in Arabic and in English, I think Al Jazeera will succeed in introducing another perspective on the news that the American market is in need for.
Wadah Khanfar
#70. Ultimately, I think the United States is a pretty awesome country but it very plausibly would have been even awesomer had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together.
Matthew Yglesias
#71. The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
George Bernard Shaw
#72. The English are very fond of being entertained, and ... they regard the French and the American people as destined by Heaven to amuse them.
M. E. W. Sherwood
#73. I'm using my degree. You know, I studied English and American literature in college, and now I'm an American poet.
Eileen Myles
#74. Printing ballots in multiple languages costs millions of dollars every year. It also discourages immigrants from integrating into American society and gaining the benefits that come from speaking English.
Ernest Istook
#75. door, something neither English nor American. "What do you think!" she exclaimed, coming in one morning as I was busy writing. "She's got a little iron grate on legs, and there's charcoal burning in it." "Who? Where?" I asked, coming out
William McFee
#76. English is the key to full participation in the opportunities of American life.
S.I. Hayakawa
#77. I grew up on North American sports teams as well as English soccer clubs.
Ian Astbury
#78. I remember reports that the American and English newspapers were very happy about the fact that so many were killed in Dresden. There are many instances of barbarity and cruelty on the part of the Allies which I could tell you.
Julius Streicher
#79. A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. You're always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare.
Ethan Hawke
#80. In 1776, at the point of severance, except for an infusion of words from east coast Indian languages, the English language of North America was not in any radical way dissimilar from that of what the American settlers called the mother country.
Robert Burchfield
#81. At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.
Wilbur Smith
#82. One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle.
James Otis
#83. The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#84. I'm a little distracted by this English French American Boy Masterpiece.
Stephanie Perkins
#85. When I was living in Paris in the '80s, I used to go out with an American model who couldn't speak French. But suddenly everyone could speak English because he was so cute.
Edmund White
#86. I loved movies as a teenager and saw as much American cinema as I could, but I hated the English films of the early '60s and had absolutely no point of identification with them.
Stephen Rea
#87. I always serve the writer first because I'm English trained, even though I'm American.
Robert Englund
#88. The Constitution was a reaffirmation of faith in the principles painfully evolved over the centuries by the English-speaking peoples. It enshrined long-standing English ideas of justice and liberty, henceforth to be regarded on the other side of the Atlantic as basically American.
Winston S. Churchill
#89. I went to the Alabama public schools at a time when my English teachers, all but one of whom was a woman, taught nothing but the classics. They revered the great British and American writers.
Thomas H. Cook
#90. As 99 per cent of English authors and 100 per cent of American ones [authors] are just such imbeciles, managers and publishers make a practice of asking for every right the author possesses.
George Bernard Shaw
#91. Throughout most of my life, I've tried to downplay my Chinese heritage because I wanted so much to be an American. I was the only Asian kid in my elementary school, and I longed to be like everyone else. I insisted on American food; I was embarrassed by my mother's poor English.
Tess Gerritsen
#92. A number of Americans were used, most often unwillingly, by North Korea to arm spies with English-speaking skills so they could target American interests in South Korea and beyond.
Robert Jenkins
#93. Oh, Syd wants me. She's just being English...We totally told her country to go fuck themselves, don't tell me the fact we're American isn't the reason she's blowing me off."
"Dan, I seriously doubt the Declaration of Independence has anything to do with her disinterest in you.
T. Gephart
#94. It's a useful rule in Anglo-American communications that the English should double, and the Americans halve, the number of words they would normally employ.
Phyllis Bentley
#95. English vampires may not be as well behaved around witches as the American ones are.
Deborah Harkness
#96. I love English, though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power.
Maurice Druon
#97. I could speak to you and say, 'Laytay-chai, paisey, paisey.' ... Why aren't you responding? Oh, you don't speak Swahili. Well, I've got news for you. The dog doesn't speak English, or American, or Spanish, or French.
Ian Dunbar
#98. I think the world's a little smaller these days. With the Internet and the availability of people, the pool of English speaking actors - not just American actors, but Brits, Australians, New Zealanders, Irish. We're all up for grabs.
Sonya Walger
#99. I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.
Ann Coulter
#100. American professional athletes are bilingual; they speak English and profanity.
Gordie Howe
