I must have got my detailed obsessive streak from my father who was an English teacher because my mother wasn't like me at all.

I never had to learn English French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

My father was the son of immigrants and he grew up bilingual but English is what my father taught me and what he spoke to me. America's strength is not our diversity it is our ability to unite around common principles even when we come from different backgrounds.

I'm an English boy. I played a lot of sports growing up but I never had any kind of workout regimen.

All hockey players are bilingual. They know English and profanity.

If one could only teach the English how to talk and the Irish how to listen society here would be quite civilized.

My mother-in-law speaks not a word of English. I speak not a word of Tajiki. So I smile at her ingratiatingly and she fixes me with a beady eye.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

English once accepted as an international language is no more secure than French has proved to be as the one and only accepted language of diplomacy or as Latin has proved to be as the international language of science.

I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying he wanted me to make up dialogue.

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.

I love the sad songs with their maudlin self-deprecating almost funny lyrics. As an Englishman they make a lot of sense.

Even modern English people are imperious superior ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.

There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side he was kind of a rather stiff disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.

I had found English audiences highly satisfactory. They are the best listeners in the world. Perhaps the music-lovers of some of our larger cities equal the English but I do not believe they can be surpassed in that respect.

I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.

I have quite a few different Bibles. Having rejected my parents' religion I still think the King James Bible is the most important work of literature in English. None of us can help being influenced by it.

Religion is compulsory in English schools you know.

You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.

In England it's a rare thing to see a player smoking but all in all I prefer that to an alcoholic. The relationship with alcohol is a real problem in English football and in the short term it's much more harmful to a sportsman. It weakens the body which becomes more susceptible to injury.

Ah the bond between English boys and California girls. For those of us who aren't either it's a bond that fascinates and mystifies. So much of the world's favorite music comes out of that relationship.

For us sons of France political sentiment is a passion while for the Englishmen politics are a question of business.

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.

I don't know why that is but English politics is just so overly white. It's very much about the class structure.