In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.
I constantly watch 'The Simpsons' and an English cartoon called 'The Raccoons' and 'Gummi Bears.' I was obsessed with ninja films, and the 'Teenage Mutant Nina Turtles,' I used to love that as well.
I've grown to love California: It's the dream of every English musician to come here and work in the sunshine. To walk up Sunset Boulevard, knowing you're going to make music - that's it.
We lived on a farm in the English countryside, where we wrote a lot of our music. You really were treated like an artist during those days-not like product, which is now the mode.
Why is it that English, drama and music teachers are most often recalled as our mentors and inspirations? Maybe because artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.
All of our affairs, since the union of crowns, have been managed by the advice of English ministers, and the principal offices of the kingdom filled with such men, as the court of England knew would be subservient to their designs.
I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn't that way growing up.
Do I have to see movies and television about the English throne or the Holocaust every year? There are multiple multi-million dollar movies with the same backdrop. But our Holocaust - meaning Latino - aren't ever told.
English Commander: I hope you washed your arse this morning. It's about to be kissed by a king.
[after meeting black pioneers] Indian Chief: [speaks Yiddish, then in English] They darker than us! Woof!
I grew up in a physical world, and I speak English. The next generation is growing up in a digital world, and they speak social.
I'm a mongrel in the sense that I'm Spanish, English, Latino, Jewish, north, south - all these things are mixed in me.
French is, in many ways, more difficult for an English-speaking person to sing. It is so full of complex and trying vowels. It requires the utmost subtlety.
In 1763 the English were the most powerful nation in the world.
I see myself as part English and part American, with a dash of Irish thrown in, and a pinch of Italian from my mother's ancestry.
No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.
Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn't been translated into Spanish.
My grandfather came over from Puerto Rico and raised his kids speaking English so that it would be easier for them to assimilate.
I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.
I did really well at school, and I would have loved to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I would have read English, and I'm really interested in politics.
I've been worked over by the English press because there's an assumption that my politics are identical with my wife's, and for that matter that my wife's politics are identical with her politics of 20 years ago.
