David Thewlis Quotes

Whenever I'm in the U.K., people say I have an American accent. Which is, obviously, funny.

I'm the only one in my family with an American accent.

There's this accent that I think everybody has when they grow up going to an international school. It's a mix of not quite English, not quite American. When I moved to L.A., it just went completely American.

I have a funny accent in every language.

My mum made a conscious decision not to teach me any Indian languages so I wouldn't talk with an accent.

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

Afrikaans is my first language, although you would never know, as my English accent has more of an American-British thing going on from all my years of travelling.

When I'm working in America, I wake up with an American accent and stay with it all day till makeup comes off. I just want everyone to be at ease, and not have the show's creators think, 'Oh my god, he's so English, why did we hire him?'

I'm one of those idiots; when I'm working in America, I wake up with an American accent and stay with it all day till make-up comes off.

Despite his South Indian connection, my husband Rohit doesn't have an accent at all.

What happens when I go to America is I sound really English. Most people would start sounding American, but I do the opposite.

There are certain situations, when you're in America, when people understand you better without an Australian accent.

Kids in school told me my parents had accents, but I had no idea; they've always sounded that way to me.

I speak Hindi with a Punjabi accent, not a Haryanvi accent.

When you're the foreigner and your kids are the natives, they realize you're clueless much sooner than they ordinarily would. I'm pretty sure mine skipped the Mommy-is-infallible stage entirely.

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.

My wife has a horror the children will start talking American if we spend too much time out there.

I grew up in the Middle East. My folks have a very thick, kind of Oklahoma accent; that's where I was born. But we moved to the Middle East right after I was born, so I guess we were surrounded by English people and French people.

The accent of a man's native country remains in his mind and his heart, as it does in his speech.

I felt so out of place at the Miss India pageant. I had just come back from America, and I was told I needed to lose my American accent and learn the Queen's English, so I had to enunciate my vowels and speak well and eloquently. Giving up a New York accent is pretty hard.

Can I eventually take classes and eliminate my accent? Sure. I guess anybody could. But this is who I am, and this is what I got. And there are millions of people who sound just like me. Millions. It's not like this is some novelty.

Until the age of five, my parents spoke to me in Chinese or a combination of Chinese and English, but they didn't force me to speak Mandarin. In retrospect, this was sad, because they believed that my chance of doing well in America hinged on my fluency in English. Later, as an adult, I wanted to learn Chinese.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

I was always aware of what the language I was using meant in terms of my bond with my parents - how it defined the lines of affection between us. When I spoke English, I felt I wasn't completely their child any more but the child of another language.

When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.