Russell Hoban Quotes

Language is very deceiving. In certain languages, there is certain vocabulary that doesn't exist in other languages. It totally changes how people feel about things.

There is always that age-old thing about England and America being divided by a common language. You think that because we speak English and you speak English that you're bound to understand and like everything that we do. And of course you don't.

The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language.

More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.

I consider myself a pretty good conversationalist, but you wind up being downgraded to idiot status when you don't speak the language!

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!'

You can go to some countries where people may not be able to conversate with you, but they can sing your lyrics word for word.

I have some English words on the first album, but any time I try to do it, you miss something. You think it's just a simple translation from French to English, but it's so different as far as the understanding.

I hate when I see someone who speaks English speaking to someone who speaks a different language, and they're screaming as if going louder is going to help the other person understand.

If there is an interpreter sitting between two friends, he may be able to translate the words but not the feelings with which I say something.

It's rare to find an Indian who speaks Chinese. It's rare to find a Chinese who can speak any of the Indian languages. Neither of them at the trading level - I want to repeat this, at the trading level - can speak English, either.

The last thing an Englishman wants to hear is a man from Brussels trying to imitate his language - you want to hear a different point of view. You may not be able to understand the details, but you can understand the feeling.

With support jobs moving to China and India, it's not surprising that English-speaking countries' top frustration revolves around the difficulty of understanding customer service representatives. However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers' growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

Listen to all the conversations of our world, between nations as well as between individuals. They are, for the most part, dialogues of the deaf.

Most of our life is miscommunication, and when you add a language barrier to it, it just becomes total mayhem and confusion... It just adds to it with all of the cultural differences. It could be an American family meeting another American family and you could still have a total clash. With family, it's like visiting another planet.

In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!

In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.

Some words have multiple meanings. Scholastic, aware that I'm allergic to preservatives, kindly got someone to translate the phrase "I can only eat food without preservatives" into Italian. They warned me, however, as they taught me how to say it, that the Italian word for "preservatives" is the same as the word for "condom." So that I should be careful how I look when I say it.

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

[European audiences differ from American] they talk different. The ones in Holland speak Dutch. The ones in Switzerland speak Swiss. That's the only difference.

So for all that we might speak words in each other's vicinity, this could never develop into anything that could be called a conversation. It was as though we were speaking in different languages. If the Dalai Lama were on his deathbed and the jazz musician Eric Dolphy were to try to explain to him the importance of choosing one's engine oil in accordance with changes in the sound of the bass clarinet, that exchange might have been more worthwhile and effective than my conversations with Noboru Wataya.

Two nations divided by a common language.

"We speak different languages, as usual," responded Woland, "but this does not change the things we speak about. Well?..."