Bill Forsyth Quotes

It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.

I'm always saying normal things, and people usually understand me, but they're like, 'Where are you from?!'

In the South we experienced, you know, some black kids who gave us a hard time because - cause 'you talk white.' We didn't talk white. We talked fairly proper. Plus, we had a Midwestern accent, so we didn't have a Southern accent, either. So it wasn't really talking white; it was talking different.

The English say, Yours Truly, and mean it. The Italians say, I kiss your feet, and mean, I kick your head.

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car.

It was nice to be in my own country, where I didn't need a translator or a driver. Where I didn't need to figure out cultural references or what hijab I needed to wear to cover my hair.

Even when well translated. can we really understand what other cultures are talking about?

American audiences and European and Asian audiences are so different.

I like to think my accent isn't strong enough, but it's funny: I get people coming up to me in America and saying I sound like Mel B. She's from Leeds. They just hear a British accent and probably can't quite work it out.

American and French culture are really, really different, but in a way it's funny.

It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

When I moved from Canada to Korea, I experienced a massive culture shock. I wasn't familiar with Korean culture at all and was very surprised at the hierarchical elements of Korean culture. However, at the time I was determined to succeed so I became a sponge and just soaked in everything I could.

When you're an outsider and going into a culture like America, it's easier to stay away from any cliches because you're not really aware of what they are.

I've published a couple of short novels in France that I didn't want to publish in English because I loved the characters too much to subject them to American critics who were not exactly favorable toward my work.

I was very surprised when I first started spending time in America. The culture shock was something I wasn't prepared for. I had a lot of work to do to try to begin to understand this enormous and complex country that I thought would be an easy process.

People just think Africa is this one thing. So if you're from Nigeria, then you're the same as somebody from Kenya; not realizing that within Nigeria, right, we have 250 different ethnic groups, right? Two hundred and fifty different languages.

Life in England was a bit difficult. It is not easy for a South American. Some people get on fine, and for others, it is harder to adapt.

There have been moments where I laughed at my own family's culture, though it's hard to separate out whether something funny is cultural, or just my grandma specifically.

I was 12 years old when I first moved to New York, and at that age, you're trying to find yourself. It was hard being so different from everyone I was around, and I felt that nobody could really understand me because everyone was American, and I was this little English girl with an accent.

Most of my friends, growing up, were upper-middle-class white kids, so it was a different reality at home both culturally and linguistically. It created a lot of insecurities for me, but it also did a lot of amazing things that I didn't know were happening at the time.

The English are very exotic to me.

In China, because Chinese is a tonal language, it can be kind of hard to follow people's emotional tracks. There was one moment where a woman I was interviewing just sort of burst into tears, and I can usually sort of tell when things are coming on, and in that moment, it was very unexpected.

There are certain concepts, which exist in english, and are unthinkable, untranslatable into Hebrew and vice versa.

HELL: A place where the police are German, the motorists French and the cooks English.

Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.