Suddenly I was the man who got the part that every actor in the English language was trying to get. I was really scared. I had talked the talk, and now I had to walk the walk. For three days, I couldn't answer the phone. - F Murray Abraham Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun, and if the sun don't come, we'll be standing in the English rain. - John Lennon ... The truth of the matter is, that most English people don't know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about hot stimulants. - Douglas Adams The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. - Ronald Reagan Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why. - James Joyce Well, then, why do we need all...

Where shall we look for standard English but to the words of a standard man? - Henry David Thoreau When we black people commit ourselves to living simply as a political action, as a way of breaking the stress caused by unrelenting hedonistic desire for material objects that are not needed for survival, or essential to well-being, we will not be talking about ebonics. We will be out in the streets demanding that the public schools have enough teachers so that all kids, cross color, can read and write in standard English and in Spanish too. - Bell Hooks This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America. - William Labov

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. - Annie Dillard The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough. - Adam Gopnik I haven't spoken English with native speakers in several months. I've been speaking Arabic. - John Walker Lindh Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage. - Marilyn Vos Savant Intended to serve as an introduction to both the linguistic and also the practical study of spoken English. - Henry Sweet

We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first. - Chuck Palahniuk My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves. - Ted Cruz I am sick of speaking English like this... I am scared that I have become a person who is always very aware of talking, speaking, and I have become a person without confidence, because I can't be me. I have become so small, so tiny, while the English culture surrounding me becomes enormous. It swallows me... I am dominated by it... Why do we have to force ourselves to communicate with people? Why is the process of communication so troubled and so painful? - Xiaolu Guo Printing ballots in multiple languages costs millions of dollars every year. It also discourages immigrants from integrating into American society and ga...

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English. - Aravind Adiga Just so you know, I speak English. You don't have to macho-speak with shit like 'you with me' after you macho-speak with a bunch of bossing me around. I get you. I'm with you. Or if I'm not, I'll tell you." "Noted," he muttered but sounded like he was smiling. I made the diplomatic decision not to look. - Kristen Ashley 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 Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either! - Lewis Carroll In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limit...

I've been given an amazing opportunity and I could not be more grateful. But I also know that all this will eventually die off. It's not real. It will go away and then you'll go away and then, I don't know, I'll be left sitting in some English hotel room. - Josh Brolin ...in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever. - Susanna Clarke Yeah, Wacko Jacko, where did that come from? Some English tabloid. I have a heart and I have feelings. I feel that when you do that to me. It's not nice. - Michael Jackson I've received some English-speaking scripts, but I was not interested in them. - Audrey Tautou

Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbiesfor example, Old English or Old Norse poetryI say to myself, What a pity I can't buy that book, for I already have a copy at home. - Jorge Luis Borges It's funny how a film about a murderous old English toff can help you. - Jim Broadbent My favorite pudding is good old English apple pie. - Jeremy Bulloch I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own. - Jeffrey Eugenides In my time first cousins did not meet like strangers. But we are learning modesty from the Americans, and old English ways are too...

You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion. - John Ruskin At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English. - Bill Bryson Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them. - Terry Pratchett It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of...

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own. - Jeffrey Eugenides I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by a friend who had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. "Which is all very well," she said bitterly, "but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is 'How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall'. - Helene Hanff

The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major. - Stephen Ambrose Don't fuck with an English major. They keep lots of useless crap trapped in their heads. Once in a while they let some of it out and it bites you square on the ass. - P C Cast There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives. - David Brin I was an English major. - Jenna Bush It's my job as best friend to make sure he's not a serial killer. Or an English major, not sure which one's worse. - Shelly Crane MAYBE YOU SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR. AT LEAST, YOU GET TO READ STUFF THAT'S WRITTEN BY PEOPLE WHO CAN WRITE! YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO ANYTHING TO BE AN ENGLISH MAJOR, YOU DON'T NEED ANY SPECIAL TALENT, YOU JUST HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT SOMEONE WANTS YOU TO SEE - TO WHAT MAKES SOMEONE ANGR...

indirect speech and irony eventually made Austen one of the most influential and honored novelists in English Literature. Source: Wikipedia - Jane Austen I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that. - Joan Collins Men may congratulate themselves for writing truly and passionately about the movements of nations; they may consider war and the search for God to be great literature's only subjects; but if men's standing in the world could be toppled by an ill-advised choice of hat, English literature would be dramatically changed. - Michael Cunningham Where's your sketch pad?" I asked. ... "I gave that up," Kay said. "I wasn't very good, so I changed my major." "To what?" "To pre-med, then psychology, then English lit, then history." "I like a woman who knows what she wants." Kay smiled. "So...

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple. - Robert A Heinlein Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness! - Roald Dahl

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme. - E M Forster As a little girl living in the English countryside, I used to go running around in the forests, creating my own fairy tale. - Lily Collins The English countryside is the most staggeringly beautiful place. I can't spend as much time there as I like, but I like everything about it. I like fishing, I like clay- pigeon shooting. - Guy Ritchie We lived on a farm in the English countryside, where we wrote a lot of our music. You really were treated like an artist during those days-not like product, which is now the mode. - Gary Wright

'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it. - Christian Bale His scowl returned. "Why, if they're supposed to be Greek, are all of them speaking with an English accent?" She laughed. "Didn't you know that British is, like, the universal 'foreign' language in Hollywood? They use it in any movie where they want to have a foreign feel to it, regardless of where it's set - Sherrilyn Kenyon Flight 2039 to Boston is now boarding at gate 14A," a voice announced over the PA system. Nellie sighed. "I love Irish accents." She paused. "And Australian accents. And English accents." A dreamy look came over her face. "Theo had an awesome accent." Dan snorted. "Yeah, there was just that one tiny problem. He turned out to be a two-timing, backstabbing thief. - Rick Riordan To cultivate an E...

I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English. (on reading the Cynewulf lines about the star Earendel) - J R R Tolkien It is as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern English, as to suppose him writing an ancient English, novel; that is a label which begs the question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one's language and of one's time, and calling it modern English will not, alas! make the difficult task any easier. - Henry James In the mountains, travelers were reduced to the speed of men on foot. Here, the ancient English sense of journey, 'a day's travel' (French journee ), meant the same as the Old Persian word farsang , 'the distance a man could travel on foot in a day,' and the territory was in effect ungovernable. - Rory Stewart

It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century. - William Labov 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 H Mcwhorter 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

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! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge. - Douglas Coupland I've written so many songs about Englishmen, I have to go elsewhere. - Ray Davies Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery. - Joe Haldeman I was well warned about English food, so it did not surprise me, but I do wonder sometimes, how they ever manage to prise it up long enough to get a plate under it. - Margaret Halsey