Accent, Accents Quotes

My uncle is so funny - Don Vito. He was always fat with the craziest voice. Dude, he barely speaks English; it's just full-blown jibber-jabber. It's so funny to watch on TV because you really need subtitles because you can't understand him.

People do think I'm Jewish. But we're Irish Catholic. My father had a brogue.

I have my real name and RJ. I've gone by RJ since I was eight, but I was named Roy after my grandfather. They called me Little Roy, which sounded like Leroy with a Texas accent, but my mom didn't want to have a Leroy as a son, so it went to RJ.

Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys.

It was such a culture shock for me, being plucked from this diverse neighborhood in London into Jamaica Queens. I'm in this new environment, and I had an English accent.

Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.

At acting school people didn't speak like me. It was all received pronunciation - 'ow now brown cow.'

I'm not against accents - my husband's from Lancashire and has a rural Lancs accent. We've just got back from Scotland yesterday, and I love that Highland burr.

My accent remained terrible. It was very hard for me to initiate any conversation with someone I didn't know.

I'm a bit like a chameleon with my accent.

Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew. It's a rhythm thing - people who speak English where they have to hesitate and think of the right word. And I think it rubbed off.

Jazz should be recognized as music of the people, based in a lot of accents and melodies. What is jazz but music that people danced to? Jazz has the dynamic thing. I don't think you have to be playing only Charlie Parker licks on your horn or whatever the new version of that is.

I think pompous accents are inherently funnier.

Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absentminded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, 'Blah, blah, blah.' That's when I get crazy.

I've actually, very rarely have I worked in my own voice. I've played, I think, Russian, American, Northern from the North of England. All sorts of different accents I've worked in.

A voice and an accent are two very different things. The voice of a man is how he speaks from his heart, right in the middle of him... And then you stick an accent on top of that.

English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.

Rhythm and sounds are born with syllables.

I think people are really picky about English accents. When a Brit comes over here and kind of does an OK American accent, everyone's like, 'You were great! Fantastic!' But in England, even if you were doing a pretty good accent, they're like, 'But where are you from?' 'London.' 'What part of London?' Accents are really precious over there.

I wouldn't have been able to move to L.A. if I felt I was going to lose my identity as a New Jerseyian. My accent has gotten thicker since I've lived here.

Since the Exodus, Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.

My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself 'the American' at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.

I have lots of Scottish blood and know that my family name is Scottish. At my home in the States I have a tartan crest but, unfortunately, I do a terrible Scottish accent.

My mother was actually born in Ohio but raised in West Virginia where her family had a laundry. She has a West Virginian accent. My father was born in China, but he's the son of an American citizen. My paternal grandfather was born in San Francisco in 1867.