Speech Coaching Quotes

I felt so out of place at the Miss India pageant. I had just come back from America, and I was told I needed to lose my American accent and learn the Queen's English, so I had to enunciate my vowels and speak well and eloquently. Giving up a New York accent is pretty hard.

The accent got lost somewhere along the way. I'm a little embarrassed about it. When I arrived in LA I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult so I had six months working with a dialect coach and it's become a habit.

I had a dialect coach from the Royal Shakespeare Company who was from Sheffield.

I have a dialogue coach who helps me out with some of the more tricky Chicago vowel sounds.

I gave 738 Rotary Club speeches, and it was just driving me crazy, so someone said, 'Why don't you charge money?'

Nearly every politician plagiarizes their speeches, because nearly every politician has a speech writer do the work for them.

I'm part of a speech therapy course called the Maguire Programme. It isn't a cure; it's something you need to maintain and work on. I get days where I find things more difficult than others.

For the Oscars, I had a speech in my hand, and I just knew if I opened the piece of paper, I was going to be unable to read it. So I just thought, 'I'm going to say, as coherently as I can, whatever I can.'

There is not alternative to speechwriters. You can’t run for president and write your own speeches.

It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.

I have enough trouble just speaking normal Australian. On 'Vikings,' we had a great vocal coach who helped make all of us sound the same. But I'm very bad at accents, to be honest.

I had a stutter 'till... I still do today. I just work on it a lot. I obsess, if you will, with it, but I stuttered throughout my childhood.

People say there's no trace of an accent anymore, and there isn't because I worked very hard to lose it. And the reason I did that is a British accent in America is a real status symbol.

I have a wonderful English-language dialogue coach. All the time I have to speak English, he is with me. It is a double effort, because you have to say the words correctly and then act them.

They said my voice was terrible, nervous, and spotty and that I must go away and learn how to use it properly. I must admit I was rather agape, since I had never thought about making my voice better.

I had a stutter when I was a young. I went to speech therapy.

If I can iron out my accent, it opens up another world of possible jobs. Whereas if you have that very strong European accent, it leaves you always being cast as the Hungarian maid or the stripper or whatever. I have voice lessons, and my coach has given me different tongue-twisters to rehearse at home.

When you make as many speeches and you talk as much as I do and you get away from the text, it's always a possibility to get a few words tangled here and there.

I never even dreamt that I'd be in a position to teach other people to speak better.

I learned how to get rid of the Southern accent when I was, like, 11 years old and living in New York for the summer doing modeling and commercials and auditioning for Broadway. The mother I lived with for the summer taught me how to drop my Southern accent.

Today, actors aren't forced to ditch their regional accents like they used to. The best example's Tom Baker, a Scouser who went to great lengths to change his accent and ended up with something alien - and fantastic. It's sad that when the likes of him go, there won't be those sorts of accents any more.

And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!

Go ahead, Teleprompter, Go ahead!

I was playing Russell Long, the senator from Louisiana. I had 12 speech teachers watching me. All the other passengers on the airplane were speech teachers, and every time I got it wrong, one of the speech teachers would jump up and correct it.

I never took any elocution lessons, no diction lessons. I might have been a pretty decent broadcaster if I had, but what you see, I'm afraid, is what you get.