Gilbert O'Sullivan Quotes

You can usually tell when people aren't being authentic, but that goes for every artist, not just white artists.

I love Jet Li, but he looks very Chinese, and his English is Chinese-accented. He wouldn't have been the right guy to play a Japanese-American.

Every time I create a character, I don't assume they speak like I do, even if they're Australian.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

See, my strumpf is in my hair. Now, I don't know what strumpf means. It's just a term some brothas gave me.

We sing in English, not mimicking some American rock singer's accent. That's just pretending to be something you ain't.

Imagine if someone like John Lennon or Bob Marley, Sid Vicious, Picasso, whomever, were doing their work, and some corporation, some CEO, some branding entity was saying to you, 'Well, you can do that, but you've got to remove this aspect of your work.' There would no longer be that purity anymore.

Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish.

I've never used ethnic music as decoration for profit.

I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.

The British have slang words, as we do, but it was fun.

It's Fifty, not Fiddy.

When the business starts shaping the art, or the delivery of the art, then it's not right.

Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality.

Dialect words—those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

People love to drop in 'you betcha' as often as they can.

I've had battles with writers who live in L.A. and were writing southern characters, because they felt like if they wrote 'Sugar' and 'Honey' at the end of every sentence, that would make it southern.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting 'O.K.' has deposed the more affirmative 'Yes,' so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of 'like' are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

I would always talk with my friends in English and Spanglish, but it was more like slang. It was more like, 'Yo, what's up, dog?' But in Spanish, I know what's proper, and what's ghetto. I know the difference.

To take the ugly language out of 'Ragtime' is to sanitize it, and that does it a great disservice.

In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.

When I go to Korea and they say, 'Sing like a Korean person,' I can't do it. I didn't grow up with that sound.

My songs have some street talk in them, but that's the way I talk and the way a lot of people I know talk.

For the first four or five years I was in Korea, I took a lot of direction from my management and label in terms of what people want. I found myself trying to fit into that thing I never felt comfortable with because the critique I got was that I was too American, and too sophisticated and polished in terms of my musicality and it won't sell.

I really like language - and slang in particular, and just the shorthand we use when we communicate with people.