I had my heart set on becoming an English teacher but stumbled into acting after meeting a theatrical agent in my dad's restaurant in San Diego.

Our last jam session was this past Christmas. Dad played his harmonica mom sang in English and Italian and I played guitar. I'm so happy that we could share that musical experience for one last time.

My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

My dad tells me that he took us to a pantomime when I was very very small - panto being a sort of English phenomenon. There's traditionally a part of the show where they'll invite kids up on the stage to interact with the show. I was too young to remember this but my dad says that I was running up onstage before they even asked us.

Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

If your computer speaks English it was probably made in Japan.

No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English Mandarin or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

It's like there are all these languages available especially in terms of image. Why confine yourself to only English? There's all these languages and possibilities and concepts to speak or communicate with.

We have the character of an island nation: independent forthright passionate in defence of our sovereignty. We can no more change this British sensibility than we can drain the English Channel. And because of this sensibility we come to the European Union with a frame of mind that is more practical than emotional.

When I'm in town on Sundays I sometimes go down to the Central Bar in the East Village to watch English football. But my natural inclination now is to get in the car with my wife and kids and get out of town.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

To be honest I live among the English and have always found them to be very honest in their business dealings. They are noble hard-working and anxious to do the right thing. But joy eludes them they lack the joy that the Irish have.

Most people have no idea how to politely answer a phone. The English do and it's been their only major business advantage for the past two centuries.

The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.

No one's going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude.

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art thinking that except for their tremendous gardens that the English are not primarily visual artists and are in nearly unsurpassable ways literary.

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world its ayatollah deliverer and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk Pop Art Jeff Koons Marcel Duchamp Francis Bacon and Catholicism.

The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

The English light is so very subtle so very soft and misty that the architecture responded with great delicacy of detail.

It's amazing when you're playing to a crowd who barely understands English but they're singing parts of your song back to you.

I've been given an amazing opportunity and I could not be more grateful. But I also know that all this will eventually die off. It's not real. It will go away and then you'll go away and then I don't know I'll be left sitting in some English hotel room.

In fact it is amazing how much European films - Italian French German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.

Myspace alone has just over 80 million users and ranks as the sixth most popular English language website and the eighth most popular site in the world.

Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone.