Michel Faber Quotes

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

When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.

I really love Anglo music, and the language as well. Like, my kids, they - born here, Miami. So I just - a little bit more familiar with the language.

I spoke Spanish when I was three, and then Maltese. I love dictionaries. I like foreigners. My dad moved every year before I was 14, and I learnt to like abroad. I'm not scared of change.

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

From 1 till 7, when we moved to England, I spoke only Portuguese.

When I first came to this country I could not speak English. Now I get paid to write it.

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

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

I moved to New Jersey when I was five, and I lived there for about six years. My dad was allocated to the New York branch of his company. Looking back, I'm so grateful because I got to learn both English and Korean at the same time, and it was just so natural for me, and it made it so much easier to study English afterwards.

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

I'd love them to have adorable little American accents, but I do want to bring my kids up in Australia; it's such a good lifestyle.

I'm born and raised in Mexico. I only spent eight months in the States, but definitely English is a really big part of my life, and I love it. Thank God my mom put me in American school because I'm able to be working in the States, and it opens a lot more doors being half and not being only one. It's cool because I get to turn it on and off.

After I arrived in Mountain View, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my new home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it was hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang.

I like to travel, and I would love to be fluent in at least four languages.

As a boy, when I was bad, my mother would chew me out in Spanish. And since I was bad a lot, I learned a lot of Spanish!

We emigrated to South Africa and later to Canada so I went to school in several places.

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

My dad is an ob-gyn - he's retired now - and he wanted to come to the States to make a better life, for opportunity. My mom said that, on the plane ride here, I did not want to speak a word of English - I spoke Tagalog. And then, after the first day of school, I didn't want to speak anything but English.

In my time, you needed to speak a little Italian, and that was it.

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.

I came to the U.S. in 1994 to learn English and go to business school, but I took only a few business courses at the State University of New York at Albany and didn't finish.

When I first came to this country, I didn't know how to speak English.

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.