Bernard Pivot Quotes

Directing non-actors is difficult. Directing actors in a foreign language is even more difficult. Directing non-actors in a language that you yourself don't understand is the craziest thing you can possibly think of.

When an American person hears you speak a different language, you're automatically the bad guy.

When I first went to Japan, I was wrestling under my real name. The Japanese people have a great amount of difficulty with the letters f, r and l. So three out of the six letters in my first name they couldn't say. It was a bit of a mouthful for those guys.

Sometimes people have a difficult time understanding my English.

You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?

It took me a year to really learn the American lingo. I really feel for people who are coming here and don't speak English at all. It must be hell.

The living nightmare for a red state NASCAR driver would be a gay French driver.

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.

Unless you speak English and read well, you'll never be a first-class citizen ... but when you say "official," that becomes a racial slur.

The language skill in the U.S. for the most part has been awful. Many Americans don't learn any foreign language.

I loved France, although I initially thought they were stubborn for always speaking French.

The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could.

While I was doing Hindi, people there laughed at me because I couldn't speak Hindi and English properly.

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

At one point, in one of the kitchens where I worked, I was the only American pastry cook. They treated me poorly. 'You're stupid. You're American. You don't get it.' They'd speak French all day. At one point, my boss said to me, 'You learn French or get out right away.'

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.

You forget, when you're in the Scandinavian countries, you forget they don't speak English first and they speak better than I do.

German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.

I'm not a native English speaker but do post tweets in English.

You have to have a little humility if you're Danish because you're never going to be able to travel outside the country unless you can speak another language.

I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.

The first country that I went to outside of America was Japan and I was completely shocked - especially since I was 16 and over there by myself. I was like: "I don't get it; there's nothing in English!"

With support jobs moving to China and India, it's not surprising that English-speaking countries' top frustration revolves around the difficulty of understanding customer service representatives. However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers' growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. 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.