Chuck Palahniuk Quotes

My mom speaks English - she moved to England in the '70s, so she's fluent in English. We use to speak in Spanish when I was a kid all the time, me and my mom. But when I went to boarding school, I kind of lost it a little bit.

I have a funny relationship to language. When I came to California when I was three I spoke Urdu fluently and I didn't speak a word of English. Within a few months I lost all my Urdu and spoke only English and then I learned Urdu all over again when I was nine. Urdu is my first language but it's not as good as my English and it's sort of become my third language. English is my best language but was the second language I learned.

It is asked of me that I give my first speech in this house in a language [English] other than my mother tongue [French.] …. Even if I knew English as intimately as I knew French, I would still give my first speech in the language of my French Canadian compatriots

I was always aware of what the language I was using meant in terms of my bond with my parents - how it defined the lines of affection between us. When I spoke English, I felt I wasn't completely their child any more but the child of another language.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

I speak English, so I am no longer cute. My tongue itches for French.

I was born in Scotland and have lived there all my life. I speak conversational Cantonese with my dad when I'm at home, and very basic Mandarin.

This happens to a lot of kids from different backgrounds - they lose a lot of their parents' and grandparents' teachings, language and culture because they have to deal with another language and culture 24/7. By the time I was 44, I was terrible at Spanish. I was always intimidated whenever I had to speak it.

From one till seven, when we moved to England, I spoke only Portuguese. But I can't speak a word of it now.

My biggest regret is that I didn't teach my two children how to speak Spanish.

If I could talk in only one language for the rest of my life, it'd be Tamil.

The fact is I do feel very Spanish, like when I'm talking to my wife and daughter in Spanish at two in the afternoon. I even think in Spanish when I get angry!

My mother tongue is Telugu. I was born and brought up in Tamil Nadu.

Belgium is half French-speaking and half Flemish, and I was born on the French side. So we spoke it a lot - like, in kindergarten, it was almost all French. But then I moved to New Zealand when I was 10, where we obviously spoke English all the time, so I lost the French a little bit.

I worry these days that Latinos in California speak neither Spanish nor English very well. They are in a kind of linguistic limbo between the two. They don't really have a language, and are, in some deep sense, homeless.

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

I speak only one language, and it is not my own.

I haven't been abroad in so long that I almost speak English without an accent now.

It is an absolute privilege to be able to speak another language and have it be something you grew up with. I think it's a very important thing and I think that everywhere else in the world people speak more than one language.

I think in my mother tongue. That's Hindi.

It's important to me to work in my own language now and then. I love English, but you can never learn to master a foreign language if you're not brought up with it.

I spent ten years in London; I trained there. But because I started in English, it kind of feels the most natural to me, to act in English, which is a strange thing. My language is Spanish; I grew up in Argentina. I speak to my family in Spanish, but if you were to ask me what language I connect with, it'd be English in some weird way.

I speak Hindi fluently because my mother speaks only in Hindi and Urdu.