Louis Begley Quotes

I feel comfortable in Spanish, I chat like a parrot, but I don't have the confidence in Spanish that I do in English.

It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

It's hard for me to perform in English.

I learned English kind of late. I remember when I got my first opportunity to work in America, I didn't speak a lot of English, so I only really knew my lines for the movie I was doing.

I could never learn to be totally fluent in any other language.

I think my English is bad.

The President [George W. Bush] speaks Spanish almost as well as he speaks English.

It took me a while to grasp Kannada and Telugu.

In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limitation that I have to work around and I have to use it to my favor. So, yes, that's why I end up wanting to do more things in Latin America.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.

What's always a challenge for me is that my Spanish is not the level of my English. Nor do I read in Spanish the way I read in English.

First grade was - I spoke only Spanish, and second grade - probably a bit more English. And by the time I hit third grade, I was learning, of course, much, much more English.

English is not my first language.

I don't speak Filipino or Spanish, but I've sung in both.

Well it is sometimes difficult to act in another language.

Only in North America is it regarded as a major achievement to speak one language moderately well.

I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.

Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.

I'm about as monolingual as you come, but nevertheless, I have a variety of different languages at my command, different styles, different ways of talking, which do involve different parameter settings.

A lot of people who live in Denmark will understand Danish but not necessarily speak it.

I spoke French a bit, and I could speak a bit of this and that, and when you were taught those things by people who couldn't really do it, you can do some pretty wonderfully, imaginative horrific things to teachers.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

People are often shy to acknowledge that they are Bengalis. They somehow take pride in saying that they cannot speak or read the language.