An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.
I was well warned about English food, so it did not surprise me, but I do wonder sometimes, how they ever manage to prise it up long enough to get a plate under it.
My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.
I taught high school English for 24 years. I always teach my students to appreciate the beauty of language and to write poetically.
I came to the U.S. in 1994 to learn English and go to business school, but I took only a few business courses at the State University of New York at Albany and didn't finish.
I don't have any interest in being a chef without being on the business side of things, or vice versa, because if you don't make money at the end of the month, you're going out of business.
A well known director wouldn't take the chance on casting me for an American role after he discovered that I was English. Some time later, he expressed his regret that he hadn't taken the chance with me.
It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.
My grandmother died in 1991 and I was born in '86. We only met once, but I didn't speak English and she didn't speak Spanish - so we had a communication problem.
I would love to spend more time in Britain one day. In my heart, I still feel that I'm English, and when I think of home, I think of England.
I obtained a job at the Library of Congress. I loved books, so I felt at home. I was going to end up, I thought, majoring in English and teach at the college level.
The craziest part of being on tour is being overseas and having crazed fans so far away from home. They don't speak English, but they still know the lyrics. That's a trip.
In English, my name means hope. In Spanish, it means too many letters. It means sadness. It means waiting. It is like the number nine, a muddy color.
From William of Orange to William Pitt the younger there was but one man without whom English history must have taken a different turn, and that was William Pitt the elder.
Although I've lived in England for more than twenty years, I still have a foreigner's passion for all the details of English history and rural life.
History class was a forty-minute squirm from which I would emerge unscathed by insight. Down the hall in English Lit, though, there were stories to be had, and it was stories I craved.
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
For example, I loved English and history at school. I would have loved to have done a degree in either. But my Mom said I didn't have time for university.
It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.
Many schools today are sacrificing social studies, the arts and physical education so children can cover basic subjects like math, English and science.
