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.

I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue.

My desk is like a ‘U,’ so I have my computer and lots of dictionaries because I write in Spanish and I live in English.

I think of myself as being Jewish and Irish, despite the fact that I’m English.

It’s funny because when I’m outside Australia, I never get to do my Australian accent in anything. It’s always a Danish accent or an English accent or an American accent.

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.

For over ten years I always had, but I don’t speak English.

I could sing in English before I could understand it because I phonetically learned it from the musicals.

John Locke invented common sense, and only Englishmen have had it ever since!

You Englishmen,’ said Herr Wurter. ‘You are all the same. Wherever you are you behave as if you were at home and your word was law.

I’m rapping in English but in an African way. I’m not trying to sound like an American.

At first the English were very surprised by our disregarding the Hague Convention. But from 1916 onward they used at least as much poison as we did.

It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.

I’m adapting quite well to English football with the same will I’ve always had.

Joe was so tired that he had slept through first hour Spanish, second hour history, and most of third hour English. The English teacher, Mrs. Lane, hadn’t taken a liking to that. She decided to...

For him, the kampung was a place to live and work that was based on a steadfast and intimate relationship between man and nature. The village was a true reflection of life in the tropics.

I’ll write the first sentence in English and the second sentence will be nonsense translated to Russian, to make the ultimate non sequitur.

The standard modern measurement for inebriation is the Ose system. This has been considerably developed over the years, but the common medical consensus currently has jocose, verbose, morose, bellicose, lachrymose, comatose, adios.This is a workable...

He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a...

The neglected pioneer of one revolution, the honoured victim of another, brave to the point of folly, and as humane as he was brave, no man in his generation preached republican virtue in better English,...

I was not born with English in my pocket.

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways...

English is not merely a language anymore; it has become a way of life for millions of non-native English speakers around the world.

More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.

I don’t want to play only Latin women. I want to have roles in English.

We were supposed to be an English literature class, but Miss Nesbitt used literature to teach real life. She said she didn’t have time to teach us like a regular English teacher–we were too far...

“Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy.

It may be a silly way, but if you remember that an owl looks like ʌ(OO)ʌ, it will perhaps help you remember that it is pronounced with something close to ‘ʌoo’.

Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.

In English we must use adjectives to distinguish the different kinds of love for which the ancients had distinct names.

The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On...

Irish and English are so widely separated in their mode of expression that nothing like a literal rendering from one language to the other is possible.

Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives – darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by...

Everything has been planned. The ascent will be completed in two days’ time. He will climb another one hundred floors today. Another hundred the next day. He does not want to take the lift. The...

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best...

Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of ‘Mary Jane’ for reasons that everybody is much...

English muffins with avocado is one of my favorite breakfasts.