Sandra Cisneros Quotes

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

If you're playing with somebody from another idiom, you can't react to them in the same way that you react to somebody that is closer to your idiom. You don't fall into the same habits. You find a new way of communicating.

Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too.

If you respect a language and culture, it shows in your work.

Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.

Icelanders love to speak English. Their English is a joy to hear because of how colloquial and idiomatic it is, but they appreciate your efforts with Icelandic.

English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.

Taking someone else's language and fitting it into your own speech - you learn a lot about other people's brains, doing that.

It's not easy for a foreigner to come to England and win the respect of your team-mates, of the fans, and of the English people.

When I worked with Chinese crew for the first time, including production unit, spot boys etc, everyone was so affectionate, sweet and kind.

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.

Since my schooldays, I've read the translations of Bengali writers. I'm Punjabi, but I read a lot of Bengali and Urdu literature.

Being a Malayali, I had to learn Punjabi and Haryanvi to be able to jump into the music scene.

There are varieties of Spanglish. There's Spanglish spoken by Cuban Americans in Miami called cubonics is different from Mexican American Spanglish, but thanks to the Internet, thanks to radio and television, thanks to what is happening in the classrooms, in the streets in the restaurants, we are finding a middle ground.

The last thing an Englishman wants to hear is a man from Brussels trying to imitate his language - you want to hear a different point of view. You may not be able to understand the details, but you can understand the feeling.

It's always lovely to know new languages.

The art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows.

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?

I wasn't searching for a common denominator - I started wondering about the challenge of working in other cultures. What I reached was the sudden acknowledgment of the universal aspect of filmmaking.

Humor is so culturally based that when I try to tell a joke as me being a white American, if I tell other white Americans, they'll laugh. If I tell an African American, they might not laugh. In fact, they either might not find it funny, or they might find it offensive, and I didn't mean it to be offensive. So these are the sort of little things that build up over time, just like in a marriage. You know, the little things can build up over time.

When I see Facebook, I feel like Howlin' Wolf must have felt when he first heard Elvis. 'They finally taught a white boy to do this.'

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.

I never meet a church that wishes they didn't do it. I never meet a leader that wishes they didn't do it. They will all say, to the person, it's hard. It's difficult. It comes with complexities and confusion as you're trying to go across cultures, and you don't understand, you didn't mean to offend somebody but you've offended somebody. But they will all say it just does something.

I love everything black, because black is cool. When something crosses over, people are like, "Oh, this is a crossover." First of all, there is no urban anymore. Pop culture is black. White kids are dressing like black kids. It's all crossed the lines now. The way I understand it is, everything black is cool. When it crosses over to white, that means it's going from cool to uncool. That's what crossover is.

That is an extremely important role: how white brothers and sisters laterally spread knowledge, insight, and challenge in a way that white brothers and sisters will not hear it from a person like me, necessarily.