Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.

Howard Jacobson

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

Age Without Wit

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.

Alan Arkin

Age You Who

Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.

Alex Cox

Time Great Age

Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.

Alex Cox

Politics Great Age

This is, after all, the country that gave the world the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, the right to own property, the English language, and the free market... we are a remarkable people, and we have so much more to give.

Andrea Leadsom

Men Age World

Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema.

Andrzej Wajda

Men Age World

The most meaningless term in the English language is 'I take full responsibility.' When a politician utters those words it means absolutely nothing.

Bernard Goldberg

Age Words Word

When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it.

Billy Sunday

Age Way Walk

When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was 'It will be O.K.' I would wonder, 'How the hell is it going to be O.K.?' The worst word in the English language is 'hope.'

Bobby Knight

Hope Art Age

The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I've read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.

Bryce Courtenay

Time Life Age

Two of the saddest words in the English language are, 'What party?' And L.A. is the 'What party?' capital of the world.

Carrie Fisher

Sad Art Age

It does violence to the English language to assert that a president who has violated a duty entrusted to him by the Constitution is not guilty of official misconduct.

Charles T. Canady

Trust Age Who

A lot of linguists in the market, especially interpreters of foreign languages, do not have a great command over the English language, especially if they are translating into English.

Chinmayi

Great Age Tin

I think the most dangerous word in the English language is 'should.' 'I should have done this.' Or 'I should do that.' 'Should' implies responsibility. It connotes demand. Which is just not the case. Life ebbs and flows.

Chris Pine

Life Anger Age

I've made a dog's breakfast of English history, geography, 'King Lear,' and the English language in general.

Christopher Moore

History Age Tory

One of the problems with any kind of talking about the media landscape is that we've just been through an unusually stable period in which, for fifty years, English language media was centered in three cities - London, New York, and Los Angeles - around a very stable group of people working in a relatively stable set of media.

Clay Shirky

Work Age York

My love of reading and the English language is something given to me by my parents, and I've passed it on to my children.

Corin Tucker

Love Age Thing

I love to laugh, it's my main thing. I love to abuse the English language.

Dan Fogelberg

Love Age Use

I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.

Daniel Day-Lewis

Great Age Where

The three most dreaded words in the English language are 'negative cash flow'.

David Tang

Age Words Word

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Derek Walcott

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

Diane Wakoski

I came up with new leads for game stories by being observant and clever, by using the many gifts of the English language to intrigue and hook a reader.

Dick Schaap

I was also in love with the English language.

Dick Schaap

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

Dorothy L. Sayers

If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.

Doug Larson

I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.

Drew Barrymore

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

When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.

Elif Safak

Much has been written about Trump's style of speech, which linguists have said is often unintelligible yet deeply compelling. Orwell's famous 1946 essay, 'Politics and the English Language,' centers on the use of abstract words, often by politicians, to obscure reality.

Elizabeth Flock

The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language.

Erez Lieberman Aiden

The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.

Eric Alterman

Suddenly I was the man who got the part that every actor in the English language was trying to get. I was really scared. I had talked the talk, and now I had to walk the walk. For three days, I couldn't answer the phone.

F. Murray Abraham

When you lose a spouse, you're a widow or widower; when you lose your parents, you're an orphan. When you lose a child, there's no word in the English language for that position, that place that you're left.

Frances McDormand

'I am' is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that 'I do' is the longest sentence?

George Carlin

I left school at sixteen - I was fed up and restless. The only thing that interested me at school was English language and literature, but I didn't have Latin, and so couldn't go on to university. So I went to a few drama schools, not studying seriously; I was mostly in love at the time and tied up with that.

Harold Pinter

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Henry James

Shakespeare's always been sitting on my back, since I began reading. And, certainly, as a writer, he's who I hear all the time. And he's almost indistinguishable now from the English language. I have no sense of what Shakespeare is like. I have no sense of the personality that is Shakespeare. I think, alone among writers, I don't know who he is.

Howard Jacobson

Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he's big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You'd learn monologues and you'd recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had a mastery of the English language to some extent.

Ishmael Beah

In October 1920 I went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Cancer is the ugliest, scariest, most dreaded word in the English language. My credentials for saying so? Head-to-head, firsthand close encounters with different versions of the fiendish devil.

Jack Ramsay

Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?

Jackson Browne

The English language started out as a distortion in my life, but nothing remains the same, and so the distortion is now just normal. That is one of the things that will happen to all distortions: They become normal and turn into something else.

Jamaica Kincaid

My least favorite phrase in the English language is 'I don't care.'

James Caan

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

My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.

James Thurber

Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He's always been there. I can't remember starting school and not learning about him.

Jamie Campbell Bower

My dog is vicious to the uninvited guest, lavishly affectionate to the invited one, and so freakishly acute that he has mastered the English language.

Jean Hanff Korelitz

Second-generation Hispanics marry non-Hispanics at a higher rate than second-generation Irish or Italians. Second-generation Hispanics' English language capability rates are higher than previous immigrant groups'.

Jeb Bush

I love the English language, the colors of it, the many, many nuances, the different influences. I find German stilted, in a way, by comparison.

Joachim Frank