…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.