English Quotes
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I think the music of the Fifties is really good. I suspect it’s much better musically than much of what’s available now. Not in terms of production, but in terms of content. One good believable song about some guy’s girlfriend and how they broke up - a sincere one - is better than twenty albums of English rock that’s ever been produced.
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I said, 'I'm going to the United States to study with Stella Adler and do movies because nobody here has done it and my passion is films.' But I came here and I didn't speak English, I didn't have a green card, I didn't know I had to have an agent, I couldn't drive, I was dyslexic.
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The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.
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Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
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To be honest, the core reason why I became an actor was that I didn't want to go to school. That's where it started. I hated opening my history books and my English books, but then, of course, you grow older. I went to film school in New York, and that's when you really realize that you have to grow up now. It's not child's play anymore.
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The reform of a college English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.
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The beautiful thing about it is that 'Despacito' is not really an English crossover. It was just another song that the world made a crossover. I didn't really push it; it just kinda went there.
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I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.
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My identity comprises of more than just my faith. I am a proud Muslim, but I am also a liberal, a Briton, a Pakistani, a Londoner, a father, a product of the globalised world who speaks English, Arabic and Urdu.
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English politics is so much more concerned with the proprieties than with defending dogmas.
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I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.
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A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.
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In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.
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I've never really had the urge to make an English album.
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English? Who needs to spend time learning that? I'm never going to England!
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Realistically, English is a universal language; it's the number one language for music and for communicating with the rest of the world.
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I never felt totally, 100%, patriotically English... I'd seen a lot of the world by an early age - sort of spent a lot of time traveling around Lebanon and I'd seen Babylon, and Damascus, and all sorts of places in the Middle East by the time I was ten. Then we'd return to Ruslip in West London... Done a fair bit of traveling really.
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I - and there are hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who felt on this subject as I do - have always liked my Celtic countrymen and disliked the English nation; it is a national trait of character, and I cannot help it.
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I don't know why that is, but English politics is just so overly white. It's very much about the class structure.
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I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.
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I grew up in a little bubble of Brooklyn in France! In Stains, I was learning to speak English; I was listening to Biggie Smalls and KRS-One, and so I basically lived the life by proxy. At the same time, I had the same problems and issues they were singing about right next to me, so it was easy to identify with it.
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People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.
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English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.
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The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.
