Bill Bryson Quotes

I had family in Carolina who were very hood and talked differently in this sort of Southern cadence.

Tell me the truth - do you think I've lost my Southern accent? I feel it comes back to me only when I'm shouting at fights or at baseball games.

But I stuttered as a kid. I went to classes to help it, and it just went away around fourth grade, when I became more aware of how others spoke, I think. But also, growing up in the South, a mumble is a way of speaking.

You can't do Shakespeare with a Southern accent, honey.

What I do onstage, there's maybe .0001 percent of the population that acts like that. I talk like that because it makes me laugh, and because I know a couple of people that talk like that. They're really that Southern. And they do funny things. I love 'em; they're awesome. They're good people.

The East Texas accent is a famously difficult accent to do.

For one, the 'countryness' is pretty much in my blood. I'm from Georgia, down south. That voice just lives in me.

Lots of people have expressed consternation that I haven't gotten rid of Southern accent, but I just never saw any reason to lose the flavor that I grew up with. I enjoy saying some things with a Southern accent.

Aw, come on. I barely speak English, unless we're talking about the Lowcountry kind.

What you hear is southern Michigan, not a drawl, but a halting kind of speech where you leave spaces when there shouldn't be any. We take a breath anywhere.

Speech happens to not be his language.

Even with the fact that I grew up in North Carolina, 'Jim Rash' just screams 'Southern boy.'

English is clipped in speech. Texas is exactly the opposite.

Well, I'm from the South originally. I grew up in South Carolina definitely learning about manners and being proper and having to go to cotillions.

I know the cadence of the language and the voice of Atlanta because I've lived here for so long.

I had a Southern accent but I had broken it so hard.

I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.

The authentic Gullah dialect is actually very clipped, and so it would sound almost Jamaican and be very odd to an American audience's ears. It's not the typical Southern dialect that we're used to.

Next to fried foods, the South has suffered most from oratory.

There's something about Southern characters.

I'm really drawn to comedy. I grew up in the South, so I'm drawn to all things southern, so my role in 'Getting On' has been fun for me to play something southern - I always feel like I understand those characters more because of where I was raised.

I have cousins in North Carolina who talk in that old Southern style of 'yakking,' if you will. All the black men in my life when I was a boy talked that way, and I love that kind of talk.

I'm very proud of my Southern accent, it's part of me.

My voice was awkward. I had a deep Texan accent.

I bring a lot of 'y'all' up to New York with me.