Peter held up the book he had been reading: ‘Moby-Dick; or, The Whale’.”To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure this is English,” Peter said. “It’s taken me most of today to get through...

Writing poetry is a state of free float

I grew up listening to English music.

I was more excited than scared, at the opportunity to work in an English movie.

That’s different. The French know that the English are superior to them and they’re appropriate about it. The Eastern Europeans on the other hand have no sense of place. All that communism has them thinking...

I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.

A traditional Englishman drinks tea to the point where his blood has long-since been replaced with an infusion of Ceylon, Assam, and Darjeeling.

Sir, — Whether women are the equals of men has been endlessly debated; whether they have souls has been a moot point; but can it be too much to ask [for a definitive acknowledgement that...

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

It is not against reason, said the Englishman, to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on your finger – how much easier to understand the same price for the gash in your...

I was sent to a school with bosses for teachers- no Twain, only cane; check your dick you harry, no Dickens either, No Tom Sawyers no David Copperfields only Webster, master it for grammar, the...

She would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English; it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?

…[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American ‘Labour Union’ in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the...

Bicky rocked, like a jelly in a high wind.

You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover.

It’s not entirely absurd to think that somewhere in the past of mankind someone, for the first time, did in his mind the equivalent of putting an adjective to a noun, and saw, not only...

As a student, I wrote English reports on science fiction.

Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages.”I hate you,” she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless....

I’m English, and I started off as a songwriter, so I can’t really escape that – it’s there.

I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School(TM). On the grounds that the silent ‘E’ is stupid.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful...

You can learn English online

I’M SCOTTISH!

I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures – its cruelty is its vitality.

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with...

I beg your pardon; I am drunk without a drink. English wine & words are vulnerable to every man.

First time my master’s in English literature ever proved useful.

Psychobabble attempts to redefine the entire English language just to make a correct statement incorrect. Psychology is the study of why someone would try to do this.

I’m English. Our dentistry is not world famous.

With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you’re half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.

Excuse me, I must go and putt

Ang Lee was educated in the West and his English is good.

Dad says there are more than three thousand letters in the Japanese alphabet, which could pose a problem. There are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, and I get into enough trouble with them...

J’ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de l’indifférence.

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don’t work that way. French? Dieu!...

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

I can scarcely manage to scribble a tolerable English letter. I know that I am not a scholar, but meantime I am aware that no man living knows better than I do the habits of...

I suppose we all tend to want the impossible. And sometimes in attempting it we achieve something near enough to the impossible to elicit satisfaction.

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

The English… are the most deplorable milksops. They are creatures of that miserable sort who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded...

In the city, human beings celebrated and enjoyed material conditions and comforts, but were caught in the labyrinths and knots of spiritual shallowness and psychological confusion. In the city human beings wrestled with the demands...

…I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary....

But the English are different, and they don’t know how to be other than different.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

There are matters in that book, said to be done by the express command of God, that are as shocking to humanity, and to every idea we have of moral justice, as any thing done...

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.