Salman Rushdie Quotes

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.

I think I have a very strange, hybrid accent, and I've worked very hard to get a solid American accent, which is what I use most of the time.

The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.

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.

By county, there's like 14 different accents in Mississippi alone. And now, present day, a Mississippi accent is different than in 1963. So we had a dialect coach, which is like going to visit France and having to translate all your emotions into French, and French isn't your first language. I had to go through that filter, so it was interesting.

When you use a dialect, you worry that the people you're imitating will think you're making fun of them.

I don't personally feel any association with a kind of culture related to state, or culture related to power, which I think is always disgusting.

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.

The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

I vowed to never use my American accent, and I didn't. Even going to get the paper in the morning to buying milk down at the shop, getting a cab, wherever.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

Your voice sounds completely different in different languages. It alters your personality somehow. I don't think people get the same feeling from you. The rhythm changes. Because the rhythm of the language is different, it changes your inner rhythm and that changes how you process everything.

I think dialects should be left alone. People should write in whatever dialect they feel they want to write. In the fullness of time, these dialects will sort themselves out.

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

I use 'wicked' all the time! It's part of my slang! When something's really rad, I'm like, 'That's wicked.' It has many meanings but worldwide, it seems like young people think it alludes to being either the naughtier side of you, or the trendier, cool side of you. I like it either way.

I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

I'd get suspicious looks from people just walking down the streets. Where are you from? They'd ask. I'd reply in whatever language they'd addressed me in using the same accent that they used. There would be a brief moment of confusion, and then the suspicious look would disappear.

The world has wanted me to speak differently than I speak. You know, I speak like my mom; I speak like, you know, like the whitest white dude; I speak like a Def Comedy Jam comedian doing an impression of a white guy.

Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development

People abroad always tend to take what the best of what we have and come back through the back door always, say, and hit us with it. And then we wake up one day and say, I think I've heard that. Yeah, it was done by whoever, you know. So, ah, that's been one of our weaknesses we don't tend to hold on as they do there.

We were doing the same thing. We will never have "a" Chicano English or Spanish because of regional differences. But I think that because of our bilingual history, we'll always be speaking a special kind of English and Spanish. What we do have to do is fight for the right to use those two languages in the way that it serves us. Nuevo-mexicanos have done it very well for hundreds of years, inventing words where they don't have them. I think the future of our language is where we claim our bilingualism for its utility.

I think the American people would be compassionate and practical. But we need to be talking about assimilation as well, something that is politically incorrect, I know, to say that people should learn English, should learn American exceptionalism, shouldn't come here to use our freedoms to undermine the freedoms we give to everybody. But there's nothing wrong with saying people who want to come here should want to be Americans.