Quotes About Accent

I guess the most interesting thing that people think is I'm English. They think that I live in England and have a British accent. When they talk to me, at first they go, "Man, you have a great American accent," and I go, "No, no, no, this is my accent. I don't do accents." And then they're really disappointed, and they try to punch me.

I didn't really like my Sydney accent - nobody likes the sound of their own voice - and when I was a little younger tried to change my accent gradually. But I've only ever really lived in Sydney and Los Angeles, so I haven't been influenced by the accents of some far-off land.

I created the characters from what I read in the script. I decided how I should talk, accent, no accent, my own voice, or a created voice. Then, I visualize what I should look like.

Unless it's a specific accent, or something about physicality you have to change, I am generally not such a conscious actor.

How come foreign accents are so sexy? If I say, 'I'm going to the store,' it sounds boring, benign and rudimentary. But if it's said with an accent, it sounds fundamentally cool.

I was the executive editor on a little magazine called Greek Accent, whose only claim to fame is that its art director went on to be the art director of Discover for many years.

I was always curious about the anxiety a person would feel when you open your mouth and you have an accent. You could have a Ph.D. or be a lawyer, but as soon as you say something, you may be diminished in the eyes of someone else.

Roza." His voice had that same wonderful lowness, the same accent . . . it was all just colder. "You forgot my first lesson: Don’t hesitate.

It's like a puzzle, putting together your individual accent and what you grew up with or what you heard. It must be insane to be a dialect coach, to balance all that out.

I wish I could adjust my voice, but it's just what's happened to me. It's because I've lived abroad for a long time, and my wife is English and my kids all have English accents, and every voice I hear is English. I've never intentionally changed my accent at all.

While the business of education in Europe consists in lectures upon the ruins of Palmyra and the antiquities of Herculaneum , or in disputes about Hebrew points, Greek particles, or the accent and quantity of the Roman language, the youth of America will be employed in acquiring those branches of knowledge which increase the conveniences of life.

I was with Brian De Palma at the time, and he said he wrote the role specifically for me. I don't know what that says about the way he saw me, since the role was of a castrating killer. Brian came one morning to the house, said "Here's your Christmas present." He wrote the character to have a Swedish accent, but since I couldn't pull that off, he switched it to French-Canadian. It was such a romantic time in my life. Everyone was young and passionate and convinced they were going to change film forever.

You know what? I'm really attracted to British women, there's something innately proper about them. However badly they behave their accent is so cute that it makes up for everything!

Usually, certainly British singers, adopt an American accent when they sing and I think that usually people are thinking of somebody else, but I just think of very specific people.

I vowed to never use my American accent, and I didn't. Even going to get the paper in the morning to buying milk down at the shop, getting a cab, wherever.

I can do Shakespeare, Ibsen, English accents, Irish accents, no accent, stand on my head, tap dance, sing, look 17 or look 70.

Davy Jones was the grooviest of the Monkees, which makes him one of the grooviest pop stars who ever existed. He was the best dancer in the Monkees, the Cute One, the one with the coy English accent, the bowl-cut boy-child who shook those cherry-red maracas and always got the girl. He was also the guy who stole David Bowie's original name.

I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.

I shouldn't be saying this, high treason really, but I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting a brilliance that may not really be there.

One way of working is just bring a group of totally different musicians together and encourage them to stick to their guns, not to do the thing that normally happens in a working situation where everyone homogenizes and concedes certain points - so eventually they're all playing in roughly the same style. I wanted quite the opposite of that. I wanted them to accent their styles, so that they pulled away. So there would be a kind of space in the middle where I could operate, and attempt to make these things coalesce in some way. In fact quite a lot of my stuff has arisen from that.

Laughter has no foreign accent.

I don't have a good British accent.

Americans like the British kind of quirkiness and the strange accent. They find it kind of cute or something, with a certain charm.

It feels great and it's very beautiful when you can bring someone of your own nationality into a story, where even the historic element of it is important. I loved that I could use my own accent for the character.

The only thing I did at RKO of any note was lose my Texas accent.

I had a dialect coach to get an American accent, and then another dialect coach to come off it a bit. There is something deep and mysterious in the voice when it isn't too high-pitched American.

I always like seeing people transforming themselves, in whatever way that might be, and a different accent is part of that.

I think that in a certain sense, we're concerned about the same issues. How do you accent the progressive, the prophetic, those things that are critical of all forms of injustice, all forms of bigotry, all forms of dehumanizing other people, and yet still allow for a certain kind of flow, linguistic flow, certain kinds of melodies and harmonies in the samplings that take place?

Working with Dario [Argento] was a lot of fun. He's a larger-than-life character, and with an Italian accent.

I started in radio. I enjoy the mental gymnastics that go along with matching voice to picture and vice versa and trying to accent the action as opposed to provide all of the action through my words. And that's really what play-by-play is.

You know, so many people say TV makes you stupid. But it had the complete opposite affect on me. It kept me from having a really bad Southern accent.

My voice falls into Southern drawl when I am tired, drunk, or in trouble. Too often, my accent is attacked by all three of these realities.

Comedy has always been something I love, but for some reason - probably because of the British accent - I've always been pushed toward more period work.

On daughter Apple's accent: She says Mummy instead of Mommy, I don't mind that. I will if she starts saying basil and pasta the English way, as that really drives me nuts.

I understand English; I read and write English perfectly, but the accent won't go away.

And it is a singular truth that, though a man may shake off national habits, accent, manner of thinking, style of dress,--though he may become perfectly identified with another nation, and speak its language well, perhaps better than his own,--yet never can he succeed in changing his handwriting to a foreign style.

There's an inverse relationship between my temper and my ability to control my accent. If you hear me say 'Fiddledeedee', run for the hills, because I'm getting ready to take out bystanders.

I guess if they ever do a remake of 'Sophie's Choice,' I could play the Meryl Streep part. I've got to work on my Polish accent. Maybe I'll be the definitive King Lear one day. You know, if they ever feel that King Lear should be more Jewy.

I'm a natural blonde. But when I started acting, I would go to auditions and they didn't know where to put me because I was voluptuous and had the accent - but I had blonde hair. It was ignorance: they thought every Latin person looks like Salma Hayek.

I guess you should approach the roles differently when they're actual people who have been, this is the difference. Getting the accent exact, or the hair exact is less important in a situation like this.

I used to go to the school folk club with my songs when I was only 13 or so and say "this is a traditional folk song" and sing it with a bad Irish accent to disguise the real source.

I enjoy playing villains - I'm very proud that I belong to a very honorable tradition of British actors who come to Hollywood to play the bad guys. At some point in American film, I think there was the idea that the British accent had a tone to it that's a little bit naughty.

When I was growing up, Forest Park was full of integrated families. It was amazing. One my best friends was Vietnamese. Another one was half-Mexican, half-black. Another one was from Colombia. Another one was born in the U.S., but his mom was from Germany and spoke with a German accent. So we all had multiple identities.

In this case, I don't know why they [Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg] thought I would be a good lavash wrap or I would do a good Middle Eastern accent. They just assumed I would. They called one day, and they're like, "They're doing this read-through for Sausage Party, and you're going to play a lavash wrap in it." After I looked up what a lavash wrap was, I was like, "Oh, cool."

I’m avampire. I havesecret powers ,” he said with a full-on fake Transylvanian accent, which he dropped to say, “Actually, your mom let me in.