Quotes About Accent

I keep forgetting I'm speaking in an American accent sometimes. The dangerous thing is that you end up forgetting what your real accent is after a while! It's really strange; I've never done a job in an American accent before.

My natural accent is American. I chose to speak with a U.K. accent when I was about to enter the final year at drama school in London. I was going to try to find a way to stay in the U.K. after I finished college and could not imagine trying to live and get work there with an American 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 stressful to keep doing audition after audition after audition. You finish one and go to the next one, and you have to learn lines. For me, I have to work on my accent, so I was getting accent coaching and acting coaching. I wanted to make good impressions.

I learned how to get rid of the Southern accent when I was, like, 11 years old and living in New York for the summer doing modeling and commercials and auditioning for Broadway. The mother I lived with for the summer taught me how to drop my Southern accent.

I've never played Scots or got the chance to do my Scottish accent. I'm always trying it out in auditions, but they always say no. I'd love to act in a Scottish accent for once.

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.

Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It's fairly sexy. Of course I don't know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don't burst my bubble. I didn’t want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch. (p. 247)

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 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.

The 'New York Honk,' as it was called, was the most fashionable accent an American male could have at that time, namely, the spring of 1963. One achieved it by forcing all words out through the nostrils rather than the mouth. It was at once virile... and utterly affected. Nelson Rockefeller had a New York Honk.

My greatest obstacle has to be accepting that the business that I chose to be part of is based on rejection and constantly trying to prove yourself. Letting go of seeing my accent and the way I speak as a limitation. Accepting it as who I am and where I came from.

I love John F. Kennedy. My mother had been a worker on his campaign and adored him. I was just a kid when he was around. I did a lot of preparation, a lot of research. I can't do him... I sort of get a slight Boston accent, and I tried to get his rhythm. My only fear was that I was too old to play him, because I was much older than he was when he died, so I was concerned about that. But it was one of those, "Oh what the hell, I'm doing this. It's a great part, and I'm going for it."

To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.

[On "John F. Kennedy" set] everybody was very interested in the accent. Even my collaborators were very curious to know if I was even going to do it. And I was, like, "You just can't not do it." I think everybody was worried that it was going to sound like the guy from... is it The Simpsons?

I really like to absorb the project and watch it and work on the music a lot and just get the feel for it until eventually a moment comes where I know I've got it. A lot of it is trial and error. Some days a piece of music doesn't work then other day another piece of music finally says something and works with the picture and suddenly casts a light on all the other stuff you've done - probably because my mind is getting to understand it and the piece is educating me. I always feel like the score is in there already somewhere and I just have to channel it and accent it.

Tell me the truth - do you think I've lost my Southern accent? I feel it comes back to me only when I'm shouting at fights or at baseball games.

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

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.

When I'm just walking around, I swap between the British and the American, and when I'm with my family I'm with my Nigerian accent.

My family is from Liverpool, so I have some of those vowel sounds, I've got the slack tone of someone from Birmingham, and then I was raised in Bedford, which is just north of London. So my accent, if it's possible, makes even less sense to a Brit than to an American.

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 feel like I'm kind of faking something if I'm talking as myself and putting on an accent.

It meant that she belonged some place. She was a Brooklyn girl with a Brooklyn name and a Brooklyn accent. She didn't want to change into a bit of this and a bit of that.

It's very much like a torture sometimes, the process of trying to get rid of an accent.

Accents are funny in that they have this odd draw for us, yet we forget we have one, too. No one is without an accent, but the one you’ve got seems like oatmeal to their caviar.

By county, there's like 14 different accents in Mississippi alone. And now, present day, a Mississippi accent is different than in 1963. So we had a dialect coach, which is like going to visit France and having to translate all your emotions into French, and French isn't your first language. I had to go through that filter, so it was interesting.

You can learn any accent you want. It's a fascinating thing.

All of my favourite actors are American and I grew up watching American movies. It's weird, but I used to do a New Jersey accent in every audition in the States just because I liked to do it, really. It's completely bizarre. Everybody would ask: 'Where are you from?' And I would say, 'Oh, I'm from London.'

Even now in America, you know, when people say they hate immigrants, they're not referring to a Canadian immigrant. You know, they're not referring to somebody who has an accent who's slightly different to theirs.

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

You are not a perfect woman.You have an evil temper, you’re as blind as a mole, you’re a deplorable poet, and frankly, your French accent could use some work.” Supporting himself on his elbows, Leo took her face in his hands. “But when I put those things together with the rest of you, it makes you into the most perfectly imperfect woman I’ve ever known.

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

To be honest, it's easier for me to speak with an American accent.

Sometimes, one gesture comprises an entire drama, the accent of one word ruins an entire existence, and the indifference of one glance kills the happiest passion.

I need your help," says the tiny figure. Her voice is sad and soft and sounds like Lila's, but with an odd accent that might just be how cats sound when they talk.

I got a really thick strong accent. I'm a nerd, nah not really, I'm goofy. You have to know me. You'll see it, people who know me see it.

In bed watching Family Guy. Love this show.! So hilarious! Stewie is my favorite :) love his accent.

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

Today's accent may be on youth, but the stress is still on the parents.

I have a three-piece suit. I’m an art collector. I have a funny accent. So I’m probably the killer.

Somebody should clip Sting around the head and tell him to stop using that ridiculous Jamaican accent.

I like everything European. Even my GPS has a British accent - it's way less annoying than the American one.

It's like these people are programmed by Karl Rove. What he wants is to have liberal critics ridicule Bush because he says 'nucular' and 'misunderestimate' and talks with a probably fake Texas accent and so on, because then can come back with the big propaganda apparatus saying, 'See, those elite liberals who run the world and are sitting around drinking French wine and eating quiche don't understand us ordinary guys'; regular guys like the guy working on the assembly line and George Bush, who is going back to his ranch to cut brush.

I just remember him [Baz Luhrmann] making me laugh, and his accent.

For Cider House Rules, I was doing a New England accent.

The first thing we did was to proclaim our Liverpoolness to the world, and say 'It's all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this'. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it, like Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, had to lose their accent to get on the BBC.