A Quote by Pat Mora

When I'm writing poetry, 99.9% of my writing begins in English. I spent most of my life in English, although I am bilingual.

Pat Mora

Quote Topics

Although Am Begins Bilingual English Life Most My Life Poetry Spent Writing Writing Poetry

Quote Author

Pat Mora
American - Author
Born: 1942

English has always been my musical language. When I started writing songs when I was 13 or 14, I started writing in English because it's the language in between. I speak Finnish, I speak French, so I'll write songs in English because that's the music I listen to. I learned so much poetry and the poetic way of expressing myself is in English.

Olivia Merilahti

It's a complicated process being so bilingual. Sometimes it's a mere word or sentence that comes to me, if I'm writing the book in English, in French. It's not always easy to deal with. Sometimes even during an interview somebody can ask me a question in English that I want to answer in French and vice versa - that's the story of my life!

Tatiana de Rosnay

Actually, I've taught creative writing in Turkey, at an English language university, where the students were native Turkish speakers, but they were writing their essays in English, and they were very interesting - even the sense of structure, the conventions of writing, the different styles of writing.

Elif Batuman

In Bulgarian I am much more flowery, the sentences are wilder. In English out of necessity I try to be clear and disciplined. I realized by writing in English there is so much more to writing a good story than the style.

Miroslav Penkov

I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.

F. Sionil Jose

I always lived in a multilingual society (Polish-Ukrainian, German-Ukrainian, English-Ukrainian), and was open to outside linguistic influences. I think it was within three years of coming to the US that I started writing in English, although purely for myself, not trying to get it published. Living in America, I was constantly in touch with English, and Ukrainian was for me a private language.

Yuriy Tarnawsky

Actually, my first group was a folkloric group, an Argentine folkloric group when I was 10. By the time I was 11 or 12 I started writing songs in English. And then after a while of writing these songs in English it came to me that there was no reason for me to sing in English because I lived in Argentina and also there was something important [about Spanish], so I started writing in Spanish.

Gustavo Santaolalla

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.

James Fenton

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

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.

Shakira

[Doing a bilingual album] helped artistically because whenever I got bored of writing in English, I would write in Spanish. It's always cool when you have the choice.

Enrique Iglesias

If you do not learn English in this country, you cannot get anywhere. We are in America. We are not in Mexico, we are not in China, we are not in Saudi Arabia - we speak English in this country! And what bilingual education does, is keep them from learning English, so they are doomed to be second-class citizens.

Rafael Cruz

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

James Fenton

The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else