An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.
English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.
When I'm in town on Sundays, I sometimes go down to the Central Bar in the East Village to watch English football. But my natural inclination now is to get in the car with my wife and kids and get out of town.
Our last jam session was this past Christmas. Dad played his harmonica, mom sang in English and Italian, and I played guitar. I'm so happy that we could share that musical experience for one last time.
Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English.
A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.
When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world.
We were a Western civilisation, an English speaking civilisation, both NZ and Australia, and we had all these influences coming from both Great Britain and America to us; sending us their culture in the shape and form of movies and television.
I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.
My favorite subject was English or creative writing. We did poems and making a magazine, and I did one on celebrities. I called it 'Celebrity Life Magazine.' I interviewed my good friend Kaley Cuoco.
London has this culture of the theatre that is so big, it was a like a dream - but I never had a thought to be able to play here because my English was not very good. So being given the opportunity to come work here was like a gift.
The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
The English king's power was curbed by Parliament, though that wasn't always a good thing, as politicians often behave no better than monarchs - there are just more of them.
I would like to perform more in English. But there have to be many good things gathered for me to be willing to do a movie. I watch trailers of every new American movie and I'm, like, 'OK, I'm not missing anything!'
My brother and I were both good at science, and we were both good at English literature. Either one of us could have gone either way.
If we had a starting XI that no one could argue about it wouldn't say a lot for English football. We'd probably be on a downward spiral. It's good that people have different ideas about who should play.
I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It's not that theory isn't interesting, but it isn't about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.
The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.
So what's really behind the 'English Only' Movement? Fear. Fear of being taken over and one day they will have to learn something different. Heaven forbid they would have to learn something new.
I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.
We should favor young immigrants with many years of work ahead of them. We should favor immigrants who have demonstrated an ability to learn and work using English, which makes their future success more likely.
