Top 1200 English Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

When writing dialogue, I hear it in both Russian and English, and try to find a language that combines the two.

I mainly wanted non-english writing poets, because I loved the idea that I was translating translations.

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.

Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.

I'm into books – I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.

The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament.

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.

I felt like, I need to do English music; I speak better English than I do Korean. I think the fans enjoy it as well, so let's start making music in English.

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 have a funny story to tell about English and how I came to fall in love with the language. I was desperate to fit in and spoke English all the time. Trouble was, in my household it was a no-no to speak English because somehow it is disrespectful to call parents and grandparents "you" - impersonal pronouns are offensive in Vietnamese.

Having an interview in English is difficult for me, but acting in English is much harder. Because when I'm acting in English, if someone points out bad pronunciation or accent, I cannot focus on my emotions anymore, so it was very hard.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.

When I started writing, the first thing that came out was in English. I liked a few French things, but they were very overwhelming.

I just write like a grown man, because that's what I listen to. I'm not even speaking complicated English... I don't do five-syllable words, I don't do four-syllable words. This is English. Rudimentary English.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes. You do get writer's block when you're writing music, and having inspiration from other great writers is great. You have to look for inspiration because sometimes music isn't the only thing that you can look at.

Writing about our gods in English is unnatural, but I believe language is just a carrier - a means to an end.

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.

You know what's crazy about Yao? He speaks perfect English. A lot of people don't know that. Perfect English. When I was over there, I called him. He's like, 'Whassup big fella?' Perfect English!

I majored in English with a specialization in creative writing along with Asian American Studies.

In a couple of Ahdaf Soueif's novels, she gets at the certain kind of English that's being spoken by Egyptians. It's a beautiful, expressive English but it is non-standard, "broken" English that happens to be efficient, eloquent, and communicates perfectly well even if it is breaking rules.

When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.

When John Adams - when - James Madison was writing - pretty much writing the Constitution, he got a letter from Thomas Jefferson, who was then-ambassador to France. And Jefferson said - I am paraphrasing - `Do not forget to keep habeas corpus and strengthen it.' That - in - that's the oldest English-speaking right. It goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215.

My English was limited to vacationing and not really engaging with Americans. I knew 'shopping' and 'eating' English - I could say 'blue sweater,' 'creme brulee,' and 'Caesar salad,' - so I came here thinking I spoke English.

It's fantastic for Arsenal, and for English football as well. You've got an English club with a lot of young English talent committing themselves to a club.

James Joyce's English was based on the rhythm of the Irish language. He wrote things that shocked English language speakers but he was thinking in Gaelic. I've sung songs that if they were in English, would have been banned too. The psyche of the Irish language is completely different to the English-speaking world.

I studied history and English in college, got a master's in writing, but I was always sort of an autodidact in science.

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

Poetry is something that happens in universities, in creative writing programs or in English departments.

I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn't that way growing up.

I'm into books - I love literature, so I toyed with the idea of being an English teacher. I had a fantastic English teacher at school. I think great English teachers make the world go round.

If there is writing on Hadrian's Wall, it reads that the English should leave Scotland to its own devices.

Some stories I write in Swedish, some in English. Short stories I've almost exclusively written in English lately, mostly because there's such a small market for them in Sweden and it doesn't really pay either. So, the translation goes both ways. What also factors in is that I have a different voice in English, which means that a straight translation wouldn't be the same as if I'd written it in English originally.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.

Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.

I don't know if I ever would have developed into a good actor, but that got completely scotched when I lost my vocal cord at 14 in the operation. But writing always - writing plays, writing, writing, writing, that was what I wanted to do.

Through my youth, there was imposed on us a culture relentlessly English. English books were all you could buy; English television filled our screens, and in consequence, England seemed to matter in a way that our world didn't.

I wish I could adjust my voice, but it's just what's happened to me. It's because I've lived abroad for a long time, and my wife is English and my kids all have English accents, and every voice I hear is English. I've never intentionally changed my accent at all.

There is a future for English films. Don't we all talk, breathe, and think in English? If we can talk and think in English, we can also make films in English.

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.

I'd been in college studying English creative writing and history when I made the decision to join the Marines in the runup to the Iraq war.

I had stopped writing plays set in villages because they were not relevant to my experiences and I knew my English classmates wouldn't appreciate them.

Well, English is no problem for me because I am actually English. My whole family are English; I was brought up listening to various forms of the English accent. Obviously there are more specific ones that get a little bit tricky. Same with American stuff. But because in Australia we're so inundated with American culture, television, this that and the other, everyone in Australia can do an American accent. It's just second nature.

Joss Whedon writes beautiful drama. His sensitivity and his sense of drama and scenes are pretty exceptional. There's no one else writing like him, really, in sci-fi and TV. That's not to say there are no astonishing writers on TV. I was nervous about coming to America and playing an English person who speaks very English when all the writers are American, because it's a very particular thing to imitate, and if it's badly imitated, it sounds painfully contorted and silly. And he writes very well for English people. It was Joss Whedon who persuaded me.

Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

I really like writing in English, and it's the best job I've ever had.

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.

Writing objects to the lie that life is small. Writing is a cell of energy. Writing defines itself. Writing draws its viewer in for longer than an instant. Writing exhibits boldness. Writing restores power to exalt, unnerve, shock, and transform us. Writing does not imitate life, it anticipates life.

When I'm writing, I'm writing for a particular actor. When a lot of writers are writing, they're writing an idea. So they're not really writing in a specific voice.

I've always enjoyed writing, I graduated with a degree in English; I've done bits of journalism.

At every point I wished that I was born English. They need to make it colder in here. You could hang meat in this room. But, yeah...I grew up in a very English household. My folks were from Liverpool. I've said this before, but there is nothing more English than an Englishman that no longer lives in England.

English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it.

I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating.

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.

I wasn't particularly good at school so always found essay writing hard, so I didn't do that well at English or history, even though I enjoyed it.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

The argument that there was a social pathology of the English Reformation, that there were fundamental changes in English society and the English church which made the Reformation inevitable, is academically stone dead.

I read a lot when I was in school in the United States, and even though writing in English is very difficult for me, I wrote in journals.

When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes, I'd get comments like, 'You should consider writing more universal stories.' But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl - just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women.

For whatever reason, we relate to anything godlike with an English accent. The English are very proud of that. And with anything Roman or gladiators, they have an English accent. For an audience, it is an easy trick to hook people in.