Top 1200 English Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

I studied English in college and approached filmmaking from a writing background while trying to learn as much as I could about the technical side of things by making shorts and a webseries.

That is one more reason why I write in English only right now. I prefer writing in the language I hear around me for the people by whom I am surrounded.

Teaching English and teaching Writing are two separate things.

I'm used to shifting languages because my father used to speak to us, to my brother and I, he used to speak in English. He wanted us to be quite fluent in English, especially when he was trying to correct our behavior; he would do that in English.

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.

On the one hand, there is no question that English - frequently bad English - has become the universal language of scholarship. It is clearly a tremendous handicap for people outside of the United States, Britain, and Australia and a few other countries because few of them are native speakers, but we demand that they present and publish in English.

The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.

Even when I speak English to my parents, I'll say an English word differently to my Chinese parents and friends than I do to my English-speaking friends - you know, I'll pronounce 'McDonald's' differently, because it feels right, and that's what I'm used to.

I understand English; I read and write English perfectly, but the accent won't go away.

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to read some of the things I might not read on my own.

When people come to see you, they know what you do. That's what they want. They want it to be quite English; they don't want to watch an English bloke trying to fit in. They want it to be quintessentially English in the way that Ricky Gervais is rude to people at the Golden Globes.

Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions.

I love the musicality of English. French sounds flat. In English, you can play with pitch.

There is one thing on earth more terrible than English music, and that is English painting.

Well, I couldn't speak English before I went to Belfast. So I learned English with a Northern Irish accent.

Speaking and writing English perfectly should not be a privilege. To those who try to politicize this matter, I tell them now, do not mess with the future of our children.

Broadsheets can be scathing. But I have respect for broadsheet journalists because they haven't succumbed to degrading themselves, to writing pidgin English with all these terrible colloquialisms, the phrasing of which is just, like, embarrassing.

I'm in fact Australian but my mother's English so I've got no problem playing a domineering English woman.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Independent graphic novelists have already achieved good work in terms of design, but all these great minds are writing in English. There is a need for people to write in Hindi.

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).

I have a funny relationship to language. When I came to California when I was three I spoke Urdu fluently and I didn't speak a word of English. Within a few months I lost all my Urdu and spoke only English and then I learned Urdu all over again when I was nine. Urdu is my first language but it's not as good as my English and it's sort of become my third language. English is my best language but was the second language I learned.

I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.

English of course is your major tool, but it is not nearly so important as other aspects of writing for example you have to have some natural ability you can't buy it no one puts it there you're born with it.

English of course is your major tool, but it is not nearly so important as other aspects of writing for example you have to have some natural ability you can't buy it no one puts it there you're born with it

I learned English from American pros. That's why I speak so bad. I call it PGA English.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

I want for India complete independence in the full English sense of that English term.

I'm always writing. A friend of mine once said, 'You avoid re-writing by writing.' Which is kind of a good point, because re-writing seems to be mostly about craft, and writing is just, like, getting out your passion on a piece of paper.

I just feel that if I'm English and writing about an American president, I have got to have someone on my side who can help me out when I'm lapsing into lazy or obvious European skepticism.

I've often been asked, 'aren't you going to sing in English?' So I'm very glad to have a song in English.

Distractions have never prevented a Writing Writer Who Writes from writing; distractions are an excuse proffered by Non-Writing Non-Writers Who are Not-Writing for why they are not writing.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

I loved English and I tell kids that without English I wouldn't be able to rap.

I'm usually writing in English, and then I'll get the hankering to change channels. And usually I'll do that when I want to try a whole new set of keys, like musical keys.

A butler in an English household should, however, be English, and as much like an archbishop as possible.

I had higher math SATs than in English - yet I became an English major in college.

I have always felt most comfortable singing in English, perhaps because I think in English.

Writing was something I have always been interested in. I've grown up in a household full of books, with both my parents English teachers and very booky.

A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.

Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

Writing in English made me become a foreigner in my own country. It helped me create the necessary distance to my homeland.

Whoa, lady, I only speak two languages, English and bad English.

That typically English characteristic for which there is no English name -esprit de corps.

[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.

Don't forget I'm not English. English people maybe don't behave like we Europeans do.

Nothing in this life is certain aside from death, taxes and English literature graduates writing in the Guardian and spoiling your enjoyment of things you had previously thought were fine.

I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.

I discovered Orson Welles in college; my freshman English professor screened 'Citizen Kane' for us, and I wound up writing a 20-page term paper on it.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable . . . but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music.

I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.

When the medium of the film is English, even the illiterates also should speak in proper English.

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.