Shoot, there's a committee to tell you everything at a record label. You definitely have to know who you are if you want to look like you at the end of the process. We've all seen people get record contracts, and by the time they're spit out by the machine, we don't even recognize them.
My grandmother is bilingual, but she preferred to speak Spanish at home, so she would speak to us in Spanish, and everyone responded in English, sort of like what happens on 'Jane.'
I want to speak English perfectly. In fact, I want to speak English just like I fight, and, until that moment, I find it very hard to do an interview solely in English.
I arrived in the U.S.A. in 1935, to San Francisco. I got the boat from China, and I didn't even speak English. I could read a little, perhaps write a little, but that was all. It was a 17-day journey, and I learnt to speak English from the stewards.
... where the Greeks had modesty, we have cant; where they had poetry, we have cant; where they had patriotism, we have cant; where they had anything that exalts, delights, or adorns humanity, we have nothing but cant, cant, cant.
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence.
Jennifer Lopez, she's my girl! And Shakira... I really like her.
My mom speaks English - she moved to England in the '70s, so she's fluent in English. We use to speak in Spanish when I was a kid all the time, me and my mom. But when I went to boarding school, I kind of lost it a little bit.
If Harry Potter's so magical, why cant he cure his own eyesight and get laid. A teenage lad shouldnt need a broomstick to cling onto.
My father was English. He date-raped my mother so she's hated English men ever since. You know my boyfriend's English, and I'm, uh, I'm half-English, which she's never been real happy about. If she finds out I'm dating someone English, she'll ah, think I' turning my back on her and becoming a foreigner.' Cathy, that's the stupidest reason I've ever heard.
When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn't speak a word of English. In England, people might be very understanding about that, but in Bombay, they're not very forgiving. 'If you don't speak English, how do you expect to work in Hindi films?'
Writing in English was a major challenge. I didn't want other songwriters to write for me. I wanted to preserve the spirit of my songs in Spanish. I am the same Shakira in English as I am in Spanish.
I love the English people - if you don't want to speak, you don't speak. And I'm quite like that sometimes.
You cant make your music good. You cant try to be good. You can try to be present and you can try to remain open so what is going to speak to you can speak through you.
Even though many Indians can read or speak English, for most, it is not their first language. At the office, we speak in English, but we consume our culture in our own language.
There is always that age-old thing about England and America being divided by a common language. You think that because we speak English and you speak English that you're bound to understand and like everything that we do. And of course you don't.