Language Authenticity Quotes

Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee.

There aren't any real dumb people in my voices. It's always irritated me about Hollywood dialogue - there's so much dialogue that would just bore a Ford mechanic. This is not how people talk.

The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart.

They [the Americans] certainly are not great writers, but they speak their country's language and they make themselves heard.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

I'm very anxious not to fall into archaism or 'literary' diction. I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but the words must be alive.

I am opposed to the idea of dubbing films into Kannada.

That's kind of my job in the writer's room. I'm always the guy going, like, 'People wouldn't say that there. They wouldn't say that.' Like, I hate when I watch sitcoms and something crazy happens, and people just kind of go, 'Huh?' and then they just go on.

Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original.

When I'm being interviewed, presumably it's because people want to know how I feel about something or what my motivation is, not because they want to hear what I sound like in English. I wouldn't be true to the task if I responded in my unrefined English.

I find it really difficult when you make a movie where it is set in Russia and everyone speaks in English. It drives me crazy.

I want a language that speaks the truth.

Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook.

Why focus on what somebody might think? Nobody talks [on TV] like people really talk most of the time.

The idea of New Zealanders sounding like Americans is not it. You got to rhyme in your language, your accent.

I'm not like a champion of profanity. I write what I hear, and the characters that I write, that's how they talk. That's how I talk a lot of the time. So I'm not trying to advance a social cause.

I always say if you're going to do a movie about Charles de Gaulle get a Frenchman, you know. I'm not French. And yeah, sure I could get with a dialect coach and work for six months trying to talk like a Frenchman. But there's some French actors. Just get one of them, you know.

I have tons of stuff that, you know, seems like it's a well-constructed sentence but it is not how people talk, it's how people write. So that's why I think it's sometimes easier for me to write for actors 'cause I know what's frustrating about, you know, sentences that come out just perfect. Well, who talks like that? And who of us don't overlap each other? Except on the radio, hopefully.

I realize that it's like spices in the kitchen. I need that turmeric. I'm sorry, but cinnamon isn't going to substitute . I feel that I can teach my listener about a new word they can use too. "Well, what words are part of my own community, even if I'm monolingual, that I'm not allowing myself to use in a public sphere?"

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

When I listen to an American singer, I wanna listen to his music in his language, because he's more spontaneous - he's more natural - and I need his point of view. And our point of view here in Brussels is French and Flemish.

Spell-check ruins my work. It fixes all my slang and dialect into standard English. So I'm caught in a tangle of technology that feels very foreign to me.

So "Embrace Of The Serpent" is told from the points of view and in the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. He [Guerra] went there before shooting began, with a script written mostly in Spanish.

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day.

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.