David Sedaris Quotes

If you go to France, you have to speakFrench. If you speak in English, no one looks at you. On the one hand we sayEnglish is a global language.

Our leaders increasingly see fit to lecture the ethnic minorities on the need to integrate, including of course the need to speak English. What about the need, though, for Britain to integrate with the rest of the world?

Trouble is, some accents lend themselves to comedy.

I haven't met everyone from all different cultures, but I do know Aussies are very tough.

I only saw one English-speaking person all the way across Siberia.

More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.

Americans who have travelled and who have English friends know we are not necessarily all baddies, but I think that seeing us being so incessantly nasty on screen has a drip, drip, drip effect on the rest of them.

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners

I wish more Americans would travel here. I always encourage my friends: 'Travel. See the Middle East. There's so much to see, so many good people.' And it's vice versa, and it helps stop problems of misunderstanding and stereotypes from happening.

Of course, South Americans are different from Europeans; I knew that when we played them.

I am used to being places where I don't speak the language. What I am not used to is being in a part of a country where few people speak my language. Call it ignorance, arrogance, or what have you, but most places I have visited, I was lucky enough to be able to get by with English.

It's rare to find an Indian who speaks Chinese. It's rare to find a Chinese who can speak any of the Indian languages. Neither of them at the trading level - I want to repeat this, at the trading level - can speak English, either.

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother.

The Brit abroad is always the voice of caution. Persons of other cultures are known to be undisciplined, prone to leaning out of car windows and cooking with garlic.

No one is perfect and everyone is different, but everyone one is beautiful in their own way and that's what makes us special.For me, it went beyond being a beauty queen. For me, it was about being the 20-year-old girl from India on international platform and a lot of people actually would assume that I wasn't even educated in India because of the way I'd speak.

I travel a lot. It used to be, when I would go to any country, I could guarantee that the first question would establish my name, and the fact that I've written Roots, and the third question, at least no later than the fourth question would not be a question, so much as a statement, something like, "We understand that in America white people do such and such bad things to black people."

In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!

Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.

There's just something about being English. When you travel the world you feel more grateful.

In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

But still, I’d be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation.

The English language is nobody's special property.

We Americans look funny when we're in France because we don't travel, we are fairly un-cultured whereas Europeans go to Africa all the time because it's right there.

Laistry....I can't even say that. What would you call them in English?" "Canadians.

Of course my books are translated into many languages. I have here, in my home, translations on my shelf of my books into forty-five different languages. Almost none of them I can read. I can read only the English editions. But, I know that a translation of a work of literature is like playing a violin concerto on the piano. You can do this. You can do this very successfully on one strict condition: never try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. This will be grotesque. So, different musical instruments provide for different music.