Quotes About Accent

I have an accent, I'm limited, I have to play foreign parts - I would love to play American parts but I can't because I have an accent. You are more limited as a foreigner in every area.

That could sound arrogant, I guess, but sometimes I feel like I have a bit of a Zelig thing. I'll blend in wherever. I'm from the South, so I'll have a Southern accent when I'm home. But if I'm up here in New York, I have a British accent.

It's really an organic sort of process. You start off with the character on the page. You fall in love with that character and you have to represent that character well and I think it's just an evolution there. Using the accent and speaking the lines with the accent in fact opens the door to who the character really is.

Sometimes I'll go into a shop and speak in a different accent to see if I can pull it off. But then somebody will be like, 'Where did you say you were from again?' And then I panic, and my accent dissolves, and I pretend like I wasn't doing it in the first place.

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.

My mom has an English accent, so we always referred to the trunk as the 'boot.' And then, suddenly, we moved to Georgia and I would say things like 'open the boot' with a bit of an accent, and I quickly realized I had to adapt; that kind of thing will get you beat up!

For whatever reason, we relate to anything godlike with an English accent. The English are very proud of that. And with anything Roman or gladiators, they have an English accent. For an audience, it is an easy trick to hook people in.

The Japanese are virtuosos. They make just the little accent that makes all the difference. So much there is so beautiful - just a shop window display is a work of art. Just the way they make all kinds of things out of bamboo that are so ingenious. Just the way this little bamboo drain or latch is so beautiful. The masonry around the streams to hold the bank are beautiful - and not all one kind and not just cement.

Just as in prayer it is not we who momentarily catch His attention, but He ours, so when we fail to hear His voice, it is not because He is not speaking so much as that we are not listening. We must recognize that all things are in God and that God is in all things, and we must learn to be very attentive, in order to bear God speaking in His ordinary tone without any special accent.

Let me say with a Georgia accent that we cannot solve this problem if it requires a diplomatic passport to claim the rights of an American citizen.

I've always had facility with the German accent.

I don't judge people by their accent, or how they word things, or how grammatically correct their speech is. Some of the smartest men in the world couldn't spell. I judge a person by their character.

Think bigger than society lets you think. And find mentors. My life is filled with people who knew me when I was 19 and had a horrible South African accent and bleach-blond hair and who believed in me in a way that was brutal. They were just unbelievable and consistent and smart. Find mentors who, every time you're with them, you're being schooled. Just absolutely schooled.

Going to Nashville to meet the in-laws was the first time when I'd been in America and not been seen as some sort of eccentric character with a cute accent.

It's part of my job. You can't play Veronica Guerin sounding like this. It just wouldn't wash. But what I find fascinating about doing an accent - unless it's a farce - is that it's not slapped on.

I'm going to name drop like an idiot now, but Bono rang me up once, right? I don't know how he got my number, but I, ever so stupidly, and obviously thought it was one of my mates mocking about. So I was like, "Yeah, whatever." And it was him, but I even went to him, "That's not even a good Irish accent!"

Being blonde means people decide on sight that you are much prettier and nicer than you really are, just as Americans automatically add 10 points to someone's IQ when they hear an English accent. Fact.

There's just certain accents that you can and can't do. And the Scottish accent was one that came quite naturally to me, which is weird because I have no one in my life who's Scottish.

In my normal life, I do not speak with an accent. It's harder for people to realize my hearing loss in everyday life.

There is a white girl from Australia that spits in an Australian accent, and her name is Chelsea Jane. That I can get into. Teach me Australian Hip-Hop culture. Don't come to America and try to convince me that you're Gangsta Boo...We're not going to believe you if you're trying to convince us that you're out here trap shooting.

I will buy any creme, cosmetic, or elixir from a woman with a European accent.

A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there

You're sonically racist, Americans. You think we all sound the same, whereas I have definitely a mongrel accent.

Never let me lose the marvel of your statue-like eyes, or the accent the solitary rose of your breath places on my cheek at night. I am afraid of being, on this shore, a branchless trunk, and what I most regret is having no flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my despair. If you are my hidden treasure, if you are my cross, my dampened pain, if I am a dog, and you alone my master, never let me lose what I have gained, and adorn the branches of your river with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

It's a challenge getting rid of an accent by yourself. I have parents that have such thick accents. They are like, "She sounds fine." They didn't know. To them, I spoke perfect English because their accents were so heavy. I don't even want to know what I sounded like. I don't want to know!

If someone is very upper-class, you have a stereotype of him which is probably true. If someone has a working-class accent, you have no idea who you're talking to.

Why are Americans so fascinated by Ireland?" Keith asked... "you all think you're Irish. What's the appeal? Do you like the accent more? Is it all the magical rocks? Oh, look, a lep­rechaun.

I don't want to be an English actor doing the greatest American accent you've ever heard. I want to be an American doing nothing.

You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.

I have always been English, ever since I emigrated from England and since the kids in Canada beat me up at the age of twelve for having an East London Cockney accent. I thank them for the cockney taunts because the beatings turned me on to boxing. But on a serious note Canada has been kind to me.

I'm from New York. I have a non, neutral accent. It can go any way you want.

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.

I don't necessarily think of it as Southern comedy. I just think I'm a comedian and I have a Southern accent.

We [ with Russel Crowe] had an Arabic coach there [ in the Body of Lies] that was really helpful, because it was more so than any accent. You have to be so exact, and there's different dialects of Arabic from country to country so it was really, really difficult to tell you the truth. And one of the hardest things I've ever had to do language-wise, because it comes from the throat. It's different. And also learning about the customs and the culture and all that, so we had advisors for that sort of thing.

The trick is not to get too fanatical about getting the accent too accurate because then that becomes a mask. What I try to do is just painting and sketching some of the sounds without obliterating my own voice.

I guess I'd always mocked the American accent. I didn't consider it a respectable dialect, but I was told that it was.

An agent once told me that if I would lose my English accent, I would never stop working in America.

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.

The accent today is on results, not on how well you work. You can't build a skyscraper in a day, but you can build a shack.

In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that's continually retold in an accent too thick and strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke my friends. The soul is the punch line.

No matter what your native tongue is, no matter what part of the world you're from, if your native tongue is distorted with an accent, somehow that's always funny.

I just didn't have time to deliver a Buffalo accent in a day, so I didn't even try it.

I'm a Yente and I have a terrible accent.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

I think most British people who say they can do an American accent are so bad at it. I find it excruciating. I find it excruciating the other way around, too.

I find it terribly distracting in movies when people do accents, I must say, unless it's terribly serious and the story is rooted in South Africa and you're doing a South African accent. But in period movies I think nothing can be more distracting than people doing accents.

The words, "I have a dog named Winn-Dixie," popped into my head in the voice of a small girl with a southern accent. I'd been writing long enough at that point to know not to ignore that kind of red flag. The next day, I put aside what I'd been working on, started with that one sentence, and followed it all the way to the end.

I think that's what's great about being an actress is you get to learn so many different things like that, like learning a little bit of Tibetan here, learning a Southern accent there.