A Quote by Colm Toibin
I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that's what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you.
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Each year, in this world, several languages do die out. There are certain languages that have their survival assured for many years, such as English, but there are other languages whose survival is not so sure, such as Catalan, especially if they don't have a state that protects them. Catalan is spoken in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and Andorra. There are about ten million people who understand it and eight and a half who can speak it. But its future is much less certain than, for example, Danish or Slovenian or Latvian, because they have a state.
I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.
There's a convention in English stuff that if something is more than 100 years old, people have to say 'do not' instead of 'don't. They have to say 'will not' instead of 'won't.' People are speaking in a way that is not accessible or normal. And people didn't ever speak like that.
Milionaria' is the first song I've composed and I published in Catalan, it's also the first song I do inspired by Catalan rumba. I started it in Seville while I was waiting at the airport and I finished it in Barcelona.
When God would make His Name known to mankind He could find no better word than "I AM." When He speaks in the first person He says, "I AM"; when we speak of Him we say, "He is"; when we speak to Him we say, "Thou art." Everyone and everything else measures from that fixed point. "I am that I am," says God, "I change not."
The biggest issue for me has been the language because I speak so much German now. I've had to focus on my English and find more words to describe what I want to say and also soften my tone. It was quite stiff from 20 years of speaking German, so when I started speaking more English, oh my god, my tongue was like: 'Argh'!
I consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.
One of the first things that my English teacher told when I began studying in New York was, "You're here because if you pick it up from the street, not everyone speaks good English." And it happens all the time, anywhere. If you pick up Spanish from the streets, you're not going to be able to speak it correctly.
Now, if I speak to people who want to act, I say, 'Don't give yourself a back-up.' If I had gone to university, I wouldn't be doing this job now. Having that pressure and no other option just made me work that much harder for it, because you have no other choice.
You'll hear people say it's racist to test. Folks, it's racist not to test. Because guess who gets shuffled through the system oftentimes? Children whose parents don't speak English as a first language, inner-city kids. It's so much easier to quit on somebody than to remediate.
It's important for me who is at the table with me; the moment when everyone speaks to each other and everyone listens. If there's good food, it's much better.
The longer I live the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company . . . a church . . . a home.
People say 'Why would you learn Dutch? Nobody speaks it. Why not French?' Even the Dutch say that to me! I say because I want to live here, I think it's only common courtesy that I speak the language.
Some people say I sound Australian. I guess it's all down to Miss Matthews, who taught me English when I was growing up in Dar es Salaam. Nearly everyone in Denmark speaks English, and TV shows are only ever subtitled, not dubbed.
There's a lot of pageantry involved in opening day, flyovers, extra long TV breaks and stuff. To say that it's not important, more so than some other ones, it is. It's the first game of the year. but I got 30 starts to make. Each win or loss is equally as important.
Russia is very important, Iran is very important, Hezbollah is very important. All of them are important. Each one made important achievements against the terrorists in Syria, so it's difficult to say who is more important than the other.
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