Mohamed Salah Quotes

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

When a kid can understand that a word can mean two things, there's some real thinking going on. They have a vested interest in finding out what a word means, because it's the punch line to a joke.

I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.

If I use the word 'khichdi' in my novel, I don't have to get into the trouble of explaining that it is a dish of rice and lentils. My Indian readers know it.

I know what the structure of the language is.

For Russians, to whom Pushkin's poem 'Eugene Onegin' is sacred text, the ballet's story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, 'Romeo' and 'Hamlet' are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we know Shakespeare and Italians know Dante.

If you keep up with pop culture, everybody knows the joke.

A lot of what you need to know about countries you can learn from open sources and by understanding the language and the culture.

It's an advantage for me fighting in Japan. I'm familiar there. I have friends there. I've been fighting so long there.

While I can't speak Telugu, I do understand the language.

I can speak a little bit of Hindi but understand every word.

When you decide to adapt some Russian novel, it's like everyone knows about it but nobody has read it.

If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from the Beverly Hillbillies.

My Greek mythology is not strong enough.

As a poet who has the tools for interpreting the poem differently, you can begin to deconstruct it. But the human being who's like, "I know about conversation, I know about language, I know about hard times," will approach the poem differently.

He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.

The important thing is to be able to understand anyone who has something useful to say. - There is a general moral here. Be very careful and very clear about what you say. But do not be dogmatic about your own language. Be prepared to express any careful thought in the language your audience will understand. And be prepared to learn from someone who talks a language with which you are not familiar.

Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.

So many rings, my fingers starting to hizzurt. If you didnt know me you did swear I had that wizzork.. and I am from Pittsburgh.

I'm liking that I can throw any kind of sentence at her without worrying it's too out there.

Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home ... for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead' - you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

If we were multilingual, imagine how much you would learn about your own culture, about the sensibilities of what's important in your own culture.

Sometimes I forget when I read a book that it didn't exist in English first.