Rabih Alameddine Quotes

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

I spoke Franglais growing up.

It is very difficult to work in another language, and it is also very challenging.

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

I consider myself a pretty good conversationalist, but you wind up being downgraded to idiot status when you don't speak the language!

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

It's fascinating when you're from another place, but you don't speak the language.

I speak English without an accent, and I speak Spanish without an accent. I really do have the best of both worlds.

Well, my first languages are German and Spanish because I was brought up by a Spanish mother and a German father, so I always spoke both languages at home. I'm very thankful that I was brought up in a bilingual house.

I have a funny accent in every language.

Some words, you know, it's amazing but some words would come only in French, and when I speak French, it would only come in English. And so the adjustment is very difficult sometimes.

I speak French, and I grew up with French, so my English is Franglais.

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.

Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.

In my house, we speak Spanglish to the dogs, to the grandchildren, to the kids.

It's funny because I'm so used to acting in English that any time I have these moments where I have to speak Russian, it definitely takes a different part of my brain to pull it off, but it's always nice and fun.

I'm a professor of comparative literature, among other things, so I'm able to read in a couple of other languages, and I understand that not everyone is, not everyone can, although it is quite stunning how many people do read Spanish in the United States, but moving between languages is also extremely helpful.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

French was my first language.

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!

My parents were both Spanish-speakers and they used to speak to me and my siblings in Spanish and we'd answer them in English.

I could never see a book written in a foreign language without the most ardent desire to read it.

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.

I grew up in a community that was bilingual. I've done it for a while, singing in both languages.

The Japanese version comes with a translation, but that's different from the lyrics, so people could look things up and find a translation of their own if they're interested.