Quotes About English

#1. China is starting an English-speaking television network around the world, Russia is, Al Jazeera. And the BBC is cutting back on its many language services around the world.

Hillary Clinton

#2. He shook his head,'Fuck, you say such fucking weird things.'
'Is that still your favourite word?' asked Isola interestedly, 'I like "verisimilitude". Tolkein said the most beautiful English phrase is "cellar door",

Allyse Near

#3. Does anyone here speak English? Or even Ancient Greek?
- A very lost Marcus Brody

Rob MacGregor

#4. I'm in fact Australian but my mother's English so I've got no problem playing a domineering English woman.

Jacki Weaver

#5. I find the English amazing how they got over 7/7. There were no multiple memorials with people sobbing as they would have been in America. There, they are constantly scaring people, but at the same time, people think nothing of going to see a therapist.

Gwyneth Paltrow

#6. My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.

Edward Gibbon

#7. I decided to apply to read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do.

Jeanette Winterson

#8. Those of us who write spend our entire lives in an endless English class.

Joss Whedon

#9. The English are terribly lazy about fighting. They like to get it over and done with and then set up a game of cricket.

Stephen Leacock

#10. Everything has changed. When I was at school and was told I had better learn English, I said: What for? The English are a hell of a long way away!

Juan Manuel Fangio

#11. I am going to knock the slut out of you. And that should take some doing, you uppity English tramp!

Jeaniene Frost

#12. And in English Canada, no one really knows where the support is coming from, but Conservatives would assume that it's bleeding from the Liberals. So we have a divided left in Canada.

Rick Mercer

#13. Everybody in Spain is sick of me. But in America, there's curiosity about the new kid on the block who doesn't speak English very well. The attention makes me feel vulnerable, which is something I hadn't felt in a while. But I like it.

Javier Bardem

#14. It's soul force that removed the English from India. It's soul force that brought down the Berlin Wall. It's soul force that gave life to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights.

Marianne Williamson

#15. I have always felt cookbooks were fiction and the most beautiful words in the English language were 'room service.

Erma Bombeck

#16. George Moore unexpectedly pinched my behind. I felt rather honored that my behind should have drawn the attention of the great master of English prose.

Ilka Chase

#17. Carlos Tevez's English should be better than what it is

Graham Taylor

#18. The conflation of the simple in style with the morally prescriptive in character, and the complex in style with the amoral or anarchic in character, seems to me one of the most persistently fallacious beliefs held by English students.

Zadie Smith

#19. the English drinking their 'alf and 'alf out of pewter mugs, the French drinking their claret out of very thin glasses, while our Russian shipmates and ourselves drank something harder out of thick glasses which were very small at the bottom.

Charles Erskine

#20. I met my wife through playing golf. She is French and couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak French, so there was little chance of us getting involved in any boring conversations - that's why we got married really quickly.

Sean Connery

#21. It is the English, not their Government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax and all the other smarmy traitors.

Enoch Powell

#22. In hell the cooks are English, the journalists are Russian and the policemen are Spanish.

David Serafin

#23. I'd studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly

Sara Novic

#24. My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.

Ilsa J. Bick

#25. We all know the old expression, "I'll work my thoughts out on paper." There's something about the pen that focuses the brain in a way that nothing else does. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes.

David McCullough

#26. I tell you Wellington is a bad general, the English are bad soldiers; we will settle this matter by lunch time.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#27. It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used.

Jess Walter

#28. The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

George Bernard Shaw

#29. Increasingly, corporate executives who don't speak Japanese are coming into Japan. Unlike their predecessors, they expect their employees to be able to communicate in English.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#30. To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

Grace Paley

#31. As a former English professor, I can assure you that grammar is the qualitative interpolation of language. Adjectives, pronouns, predicates, past pluperfect indicative - ridiculous. It has qualities, shadings, differentiations, rhythmic structures of symbolic meaning.

Frederick Lenz

#32. If you're, like, a PhD student in English, and you look at each instance that Richard Yates is mentioned in the book ... it has sort of it's own narrative that one could analyze and write literary criticism about.

Tao Lin

#33. There's something very strange about Sherlock Holmes, especially if you're an English schoolboy. When you read the stories, they stay with you forever.

Anthony Horowitz

#34. I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.

Christopher Walken

#35. Mitch Glazer and I went to high school together, and his mother was my English teacher for two years. She was my favorite teacher, and I followed Mitch's career as a journalist, so we've kind of kept in touch over the years.

Mickey Rourke

#36. Sometimes when I have an idea, and I say, 'Okay, let's - it will be great, maybe, if I sing in English, a couple of songs.' Now, the record company and everybody's like, 'No way, you have to sing in Spanish.' And that's, you know, really good for me.

Juanes

#37. Regret; The saddest word in the English language.

Tonya Hurley

#38. The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.

Charlotte Gainsbourg

#39. I'll never forget where I'm from, never forget my roots. It doesn't matter where I live. I'm English, simple as that.

David Beckham

#40. A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Malcolm Gladwell

#41. Most of the black women who lived in the lower end of Vrededorp came from the countryside and were there to be near their menfolk who worked in the mines. They spoke neither English nor Afrikaans.

Peter Abrahams

#42. Clutter is stuck energy. The word "clutter" derives from the Middle English word "clotter," which means to coagulate - and that's about as stuck as you can get.

Karen Kingston

#43. I've dubbed for my roles in Hindi, English, and Italian. Therefore, I'm used to the process. But, dubbing is hard, especially when you are dubbing for a prominent actor.

Kabir Bedi

#44. My parents were both Spanish-speakers and they used to speak to me and my siblings in Spanish and we'd answer them in English.

America Ferrera

#45. The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.

Henry David Thoreau

#46. In Spanish there is a word for which I can't find a counterword in English. It is the verb VACILAR ... It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere, but does not greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction.

John Steinbeck

#47. If one day I leave Arsenal, I will never sign for another English team. Quite sure.

Cesc Fabregas

#48. The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

Ian McEwan

#49. We'd been apart so long
I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that."
"My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you.

Kurt Vonnegut

#50. No damsel was ever in more distress, no dray horse more flogged, no defenseless child more drunkenly abused than the English language today. And

Robert Hartwell Fiske

#51. All day
I practice
squeezing hisses
through my teeth.

Whoever invented
English
must have loved
snakes.

Thanhha Lai

#52. Yes, they broke the law, but we can't deport them. Let's get over this pointing fingers and do something about that, whether it - they have to pay a fine, learn to speak English, the history, you can do that. And then you have to give visas for the skills we need.

Michael Bloomberg

#53. I've been working with Spanish, French, some more American, and Japanese directors. And then I realized I have to study English, and that's why I moved to New York two years ago.

Rinko Kikuchi

#54. That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable ... but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music.

John R. Rickford

#55. English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.

Norman Spinrad

#56. Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He's always been there. I can't remember starting school and not learning about him.

Jamie Campbell Bower

#57. Sometimes I feel I can't quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I'm too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it.

Sandra Cisneros

#58. Professors of classics - not even a professor of English - professors of classics, they're something sacred; it's almost like being a priest.

Erich Segal

#59. The effective combination of the whole English-speaking world in the waging of war and the creation of the Grand Alliance form the conclusion to this part of my account. WINSTON S. CHURCHILL CHARTWELL January 1, 1950

Winston S. Churchill

#60. I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.

Antonya Nelson

#61. Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time.

Laura Mullen

#62. He is the English Horace,

Alexander Pope

#63. I don't like English bands. They're too structured.

Tommy Bolin

#64. He seems to have declared war on the King's English as well as on the English king.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#65. Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

Robert Benchley

#66. Also, whenever you have direct speech, and I don't quite know why, but it always gets better in English. Dialogue, the flow of dialogue, English just has a better way with it.

Daniel Kehlmann

#67. I realized with horror that I'd left my thesaurus in English class, and so wouldn't be able to describe their beauty in suitably poetic terms, but let me tell you, they were smokin' hot and no bullshit.

Stephfordy Mayo

#68. So James refusing to sit down was a big deal. Unheard of. Like a black child suddenly saying in an English accent to its mama, "No, madam, I will not retrieve a switch so that you may beat me with it. I believe your request to be not only abusive, but also absurd.

Ernessa T. Carter

#69. There is no word in the English language for the feeling someone gets when they suddenly realize they're standing next to an unholy monster impersonating a human. Monstralization, maybe?

David Wong

#70. Well-bred English people never have imagination ...

Dorothy L. Sayers

#71. I spoke in English because the language of the Frisian people is so close to our own.

Bernard Cornwell

#72. Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#73. The process of specialization tends, almost inevitably, to narrow the sources from which the rules of any science are drawn; and English law is no exception from this rule.

Edward Jenks

#74. The aim of English cricket is, in fact, mainly to beat Australia.

Jim Laker

#75. The scent of new-mown grass wafted on the warm breeze, mingled with the smoke of leaves burning on a distant bonfire. The scents and sounds of an English summer Sunday, unchanged for centuries, Ben thought. Polite

Rhys Bowen

#76. One. Word.
NO.
No is a powerful word. To me, it's the single most powerful word in the English language. Said clearly, strongly and with enough frequency and force, it can alter the course of history.

Shonda Rhimes

#77. Everything is possible for an eccentric, especially when he is English.

Jules Verne

#78. English music is white - it evades everything.

Edward Elgar

#79. There are no English, French, German or American Jews, but only Jews > > >living in England, France, Germany or America.

Chaim Weizmann

#80. If English money was of the same value then as before, Hamburgh money must have risen in value. But where is the proof of this?

David Ricardo

#81. It is impossible," I concluded, "to find any satisfaction in the thought of 25,000 slaughtered Germans, left to mutilation and decay; the destruction of men as though beasts, whether they be English, French, German or anything else, seems a crime to the whole march of civilization.

Vera Brittain

#82. He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colonialised.

Angela Carter

#83. Intermarriage is one of the most provocative words in the English language

Clotye Murdock Larsson

#84. Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew. It's a rhythm thing - people who speak English where they have to hesitate and think of the right word. And I think it rubbed off.

Christopher Walken

#85. Nicki Minaj thanked me on the first mixtape that she put out. She shouted me out, said thank you for allowing her to borrow my English accent sometimes. And honestly, a lot of people have told me that I've influenced them.

Monie Love

#86. The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain.

Bill Bryson

#87. The English alphabet is pure insanity ... , It can hardly spell any word in the language with any degree of certainty.

Mark Twain

#88. 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.

Noam Chomsky

#89. Sometimes English football takes pride in having the lowest yellow-card count in Europe, but of course it will have if you can take someone's leg off and still not be booked.

Luis Suarez

#90. I spent more time in America, but I developed a very English sense of humour. I clicked into it deeply with Peter Sellers, who is still probably my favourite comedian.

Christopher Guest

#91. When I look at my clothes, I think of them as an expression of the joy and fun of fashion - with a bit of English eccentricity thrown in.

Suzy Menkes

#92. There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world. I suppose about 5,000 of them were written in the English language, and 5,000 more have been translated. - Roger Mifflin

Christopher Morley

#93. 'Suits' fans. I've never met a more diverse audience: across gender, race, class. It's incredible. People who are high-powered lawyers to doormen. A Chinese immigrant cable installer - who barely spoke English - loves 'Suits!'

David Costabile

#94. 'Out' was my real breakthrough, the novel that became a hit in Japan and sold a lot of books, so it was sort of an obvious choice for being the first book to be translated into English.

Natsuo Kirino

#95. I know that sounds odd, but I have always felt that the English love children as long as they are polite, quiet, and well behaved. Americans seem to love children however they behave.

Jane Green

#96. My mother-in-law speaks not a word of English. I speak not a word of Tajiki. So I smile at her ingratiatingly and she fixes me with a beady eye.

Wilbur Smith

#97. The ten most powerful two-letter words in the English language are: If it is to be, it is up to me.

Harvey MacKay

#98. I was looking for a name with an old English sound, very easy to pronounce in every language and easy to remember. At the beginning I used J. P. Tod's, but then in 1999 it was shortened since too many people were asking who was Mr. J. P. Tod's.

Diego Della Valle

#99. In fact, when I met Kit Harington first, he was pretty much feeling how I'm feeling today - at a photo shoot and you've had no sleep. He was just a really nice, English, down-to-earth guy. No pretense, nothing.

Max Irons

#100. Aw, come on. I barely speak English, unless we're talking about the Lowcountry kind.

Kami Garcia