Elif Safak Quotes

I didn't move to Miami to live in a Spanish-speaking province.

I came here when I was almost 22. I'm perfectly bilingual, but I'm never going to sound like Sandra Bullock.

I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.

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

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.

My primary and secondary education was in French, which had a lasting influence on my life.

Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.

I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.

I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating.

I didn't speak English until I came to Pittsburgh.

We spoke French at home and I didn't know any English until I went to school. My mother was French and met my father when he visited France as a student on a teaching placement.

It's a complicated process being so bilingual. Sometimes it's a mere word or sentence that comes to me, if I'm writing the book in English, in French. It's not always easy to deal with. Sometimes even during an interview somebody can ask me a question in English that I want to answer in French and vice versa - that's the story of my life!

I studied in American school, so yes, I grew up speaking English and Spanish. Obviously, Spanish is my first language.

I speak English with my dad and Swedish with my mom; it's quite schizophrenic.

I'm used to shifting languages because my father used to speak to us, to my brother and I, he used to speak in English. He wanted us to be quite fluent in English, especially when he was trying to correct our behavior; he would do that in English.

I grew up speaking Spanish. The woman who helped raise me was only Spanish-speaking, so it was one of my primary languages as a kid. And I lived in Spain for a while.

I didn't speak English until I was ten, when Philip Burton, the schoolmaster who became my guardian, took me under his wing.

I learned Punjabi before I learned English in spite of the fact that I was born in Canada.

I so want to be able to speak another language. I love the way my friends who are half Italian and half English break from one language into another without even pausing.

My father had barely any education. He could hardly write or count. But his great pride was that he was perfectly bilingual. In the household, he entertained this idea that we had to speak both languages.

Neither of my parents had English as a first language.

I haven't even grown up on Hindi films because my Hindi is bad; I am a Parsi and we speak English or Gujarati at home.

Nothing in my younger life could have told me I would have needed to know how to speak English.

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