I don't know if English is the only language where some expressions only and solely mean the opposite of what they say but we do have an awful lot of them.
A. A. Gill
It's difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language.
A. E. van Vogt
An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading the one-eyed.
A. J. Liebling
Ben Rome was a perfectionist. He checked every letter that went out to make sure the English was correct.
A. James Clark
It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue - but I would argue it nevertheless - that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music - both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing - is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.
A. N. Wilson
An Englishman never enjoys himself, except for a noble purpose.
A. P. Herbert
The Englishman never enjoys himself except for a noble purpose.
English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.
A. S. Byatt
I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.
In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
Aaron Lazar
What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book - a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.
Aaron Swartz
It's funny because if you ever ask anyone in England to try and do a Beatles accent, no one knows what they really sound like. If you ask anyone in America, they would try and give it a go. English people just know their songs.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson
When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.
Aasif Mandvi
I was born in Mumbai, but I grew up in England, and then my adulthood has been in the States. I'm an American stuffed with an English person with an Indian person inside. I feel like those things kind of inform me in some way, which I think helps me as an actor.
It's important on any English wicket to leave well.
AB de Villiers
So I went to English school, secondary English school, so forget going to Mecca for my religious education.
Abdullah Ahmad Badawi
I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.
Abigail Breslin
There's songs you listen to at really heavy times, and you associate those songs with being depressed. 'English Rose' by The Jam, I can't listen to - it's just too heavy for me. 'Julia' by The Beatles, too. That popped up the other day, and I had to skip to the next song. They're both really awesome, moving songs, but I can't listen to them.
Ad-Rock
I wrote for this sketch group called Olde English for about six years and we made a movie together, but we sort of stopped making sketches.
Adam Conover
Math just wasn't my favorite. I didn't get how important math is and how it relates to real life. That's why I think I was turned off to it. Once I got down arithmetic and a little bit of algebra, I think I checked out. As I've gotten older, I think there's a lot more relation to math. English was my favorite subject.
Aston Villa and Middlesbrough, they showed me what is English football. It's tough, it's difficult and they showed me how life is like in professional football.
Obviously you know match-fixing is out there but you don't really associate it with the English game.
Although my father is English, I was brought up in Australia.
In our generation, everybody told us that it's really important and it's nice to be able to speak a lot of languages. It's an art, too. It really impresses me, people who speak, like, seven languages. I admire them so much, so I began with English, and then Spanish and maybe Portuguese.
I remember when I first came to America, nobody had a clue what a black Englishman was. I was either South African or Australian to them.
Growing up in this post-apartheid era, the first generation of teens in South Africa living in this new democracy, I often found myself feeling different. I was often the only person of color in an otherwise all-white school. And within the Indian community, because of my training with an English acting teacher, my accent was very different.
Pakistan never valued Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan saab until English songwriter Peter Gabriel started collaborating with him. After that, the country suddenly realised that they have an amazing talent. This is the story of a lot of artistes there.
We had at our disposal the first operational jet, which superseded by at least 150 knots the fastest American and English fighters. This was a unique situation.
I was seized on the 8th of June, 1824, in consequence of the war with Bengal and, in company with Dr. Price, three Englishmen, one American, and one Greek, was thrown into the death prison at Ava, where we lay eleven months - nine months in three pairs and two months in five pairs of fetters.
Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.
I have a wonderful English-language dialogue coach. All the time I have to speak English, he is with me. It is a double effort, because you have to say the words correctly and then act them.
I've performed in Japan before, as well as many other non-English speaking countries. I find you really just have to be a bit more animated than usual. Call-and-response routines work well, if they are simple. Otherwise, I just dance around like a circus monkey and hope the crowd feels it.
America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.
When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.
I was more excited than scared, at the opportunity to work in an English movie.
I used to do a lot of plays in English, Hindi, and Urdu. I wanted to be an actor since I was three and a half.
My father was a very special human being. He was brilliant in academics, sports and the arts. He wrote, performed and directed plays in English and Hindi/Urdu at his regiment.
I did very extensive diligence on Al Jazeera English, the network from which Al Jazeera America is going to be derived, and it's really very clear that they have long since established a reputation for excellence and integrity and objectivity.
There's a famous artist, Ron English, in New York, that just, or Andy Warhol for that matter, that did pop art that terrorized society. And that's, for the last like 10, 15 years, that's all I wanted to do, is terrorize society and make them look into a mirror and see what the hell we have wrought.
A lot of Latinos are like me: third generation, English speaking.
Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward.
I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
I think it is very possible that my deeper character is not very English.
One of the strengths of the U.K. is its ability to attract very highly talented people from all over the places, but also their ability to send English people outside. So they're very brain circulation-oriented, and I do hope, even with Brexit, they will keep this asset they have.
I think maybe the English don't want to try something and look stupid, because they are a bit reserved.
I tend to curse in French more often than I do in English.
Something I miss terribly from the '60s - the most important phrase in the English language was, 'I got hung up.' Somebody says they got hung up, it's unassailable, you know? You don't go near that. Whoa! I know what that can be like.
I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.
I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.
