W. G. Sebald Quotes

I consider myself a pretty good conversationalist, but you wind up being downgraded to idiot status when you don't speak the language!

Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia.

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

I think my English is bad.

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.

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.

Nothing in my younger life could have told me I would have needed to know how to speak English.

I speak French fluently, so that really helped.

I failed world geography, civics, Spanish and English. And when you fail Spanish and English, they do not consider you bilingual. They may call you bi-ignorant because you can't speak any language.

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.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

I'm a professor of comparative literature, among other things, so I'm able to read in a couple of other languages, and I understand that not everyone is, not everyone can, although it is quite stunning how many people do read Spanish in the United States, but moving between languages is also extremely helpful.

People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.

I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.

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

I wish that I spoke more languages. I speak a couple languages, but not well enough to really dub myself. French is really the only one, and it's a difficult thing.

I want to speak seventeen languages. When you think like that, you'll be consumed by failure. I'm haunted daily by what I don't know.

Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation; then it got an undeservedly exalted one.

I would love to be bilingual. I think having a second or third language at my bidding would open up the world in amazing ways.

I think we are living in an age where we really need to have bilingual leaders so that we can communicate with our constituents.

I talk bilingual.

It's good to have someone who speaks your language in everyday life, especially for me, who does not speak English so well.

I always think if you speak to someone in their second language, you speak to their head. If you speak in their first, you speak to their heart. I've always tried to let players see that.

I wish I knew more languages.

It's always lovely to know new languages.