Michael Korda Quotes

Sweden is a small country, and a Swedish writer can barely make a living as an author. We were able to quit our jobs as journalists only after we had been translated into, among others, German.

When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.

I've found that one's language abilities, especially for Korean kids like me, get frozen at the age you immigrated. So I've always associated Korea with being a child and being infantilized through my inability to speak.

I came here when I was almost 22. I'm perfectly bilingual, but I'm never going to sound like Sandra Bullock.

It's old news, me and my accent, but it always seems to make headlines.

If you're a Norwegian writer, you are not visible in the world. The door of the English language is very hard to open for a Norwegian writer.

Most Arab Israelis speak Hebrew, but not the other way around. It's about time that changed.

It's a complicated process being so bilingual. Sometimes it's a mere word or sentence that comes to me, if I'm writing the book in English, in French. It's not always easy to deal with. Sometimes even during an interview somebody can ask me a question in English that I want to answer in French and vice versa - that's the story of my life!

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.

Even when well translated. can we really understand what other cultures are talking about?

I know Asian actors out there won't even audition for a role that have an accent. But for me, I was the kid with an accent. I still have an accent to some degree.

If you are educated in English-medium schools, you get a better view of the world, develop more liberal values, have more gender sensitivity and become more forward looking. But you pay a price because you don't know your own language.

I find it hard to write really cool texts in German. At some point I had the feeling that it didn't work for me any more. So I'd rather not write any German songs at all than write uncool ones.

In America, they don't need to look outside their country for anything, so they definitely don't need to look elsewhere for rappers with weird accents that they have to get accustomed to, which is like homework to them.

Hindi film industry makes film for the rest of the world. Tamil films are watched by Malay people. When a film is not bound by a language, why should an actor be?

Neither of my parents had English as a first language.

The fact that I didn't speak English I think was the most difficult thing for me.

It's so wild to be able to say that I can do shows in front of thousands of people and have them sing my songs in Korean and in English - that is wild to me.

There is a future for English films. Don't we all talk, breathe, and think in English? If we can talk and think in English, we can also make films in English.

Has my accent held me back? I don't believe it has at all. I think it can be a colourful accent.

I've often been asked, 'aren't you going to sing in English?' So I'm very glad to have a song in English.

I have done films in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada. I don't find any difference.

When I went to London, they told me I spoke with a funny accent - English with a Chinese accent.

My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.