Ralph Fiennes Quotes

I can't speak much Italian. I do go down well over there, but it's frustrating because I can't really speak it. Even if I do talk, they can't understand my accent, but I should try to learn it.

I understand English; I read and write English perfectly, but the accent won't go away.

The first thing I have to do to erase my French accent is think that it is actually possible, whereas for the moment, I think it's not. I have a lot of work.

I have a funny accent in every language.

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

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

When you become an American, they give you an injection so your accent changes.

I'm not a xenophobe - I think immigration is a good thing for most countries - but they transmute the foibles of their native tongues into English in a way that's difficult to figure out.

Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spoken in particular by young men colloquially to each other. So that really is an issue.

An agent once told me that if I would lose my English accent, I would never stop working in America.

When I was taught Shakespeare in school, it was such an alien, sanitized puzzle, it made no sense.

I am very up front about about my inability to pronounce things correctly.

I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about.

Language just gradually came in, one or two stressed words a time. Before then, I would just scream. I couldn't talk. I couldn't get my words out. So the only way I could tell someone what I wanted was to scream. If I didn't want to wear a hat, the only way I knew to communicate was screaming and throwing it on the floor.

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

Anyone that has come to America past the age of eighteen will be able to understand when I say that you can never shake your accent.

Are you trying to give me a hint that I should drop it? I can lose the accent; I just have to really focus on what I'm saying. And I have to talk slowly.

I really want to do a film in another language. My dad's from Germany, so it'd be really cool to do a film in German. I'm not quite fluent, but I can get there. And my accent's pretty good. I wouldn't feel too out of my element.

Everyone tells me I have a funny accent. It's because I copy people. I learned English at school but have best friends who are French, Australian, English and American; a very weird mix.

Shakespeare's language does not require a British accent. It requires a facility with language, and that's all.

For the benefit of those who are not bilingual, I will now continue in English.

There's always a certain kind of homework you have to do when there's an accent involved.

I don't do Shakespeare. I don't talk in that kind of broken English.

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!'

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.