David Wong Quotes

The Germans and I no longer speak the same language.

I don't know if my sense of humor goes over Americans' heads.

The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn't understand the horse dealer's language.

For my next trick I will make everyone understand me.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

My name can't be that tough to pronounce!

Political rhetoric leads only to confusion.

I'm not letting him write anything. I didn't do anything. I just took his pen.

Sometimes Americans don't quite get my sense of humor. My good ol' British sarcasm seems to go over their heads.

Not every time there's a disagreement is somebody lying.

What Thucydides said of the Greeks at the time of the Peleponnesian War applies to us at present [1860]. The Greeks did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke the same language; words received a different meaning in different parts.

A close friend can become a close enemy.

A diplomat is one that says something that is equally misunderstood by both sides, and never clear to either.

I will write plain & slow because I know you have no time to listen to trifles. This is no trifle. When one nation is at war with another, all the People of the one are the enemies of the other.... Most unfortunately the war in which we are now Engaged, has been complicated with the belief on the one hand that all on the other were not Enemies. It would have been better if at the outset this mistake had not been made, and it is wrong longer to be misled by it.

It's hard when you're not a native speaker, because everyone's laughing, and you're like, 'What was that? Can you tell me again?'

No one can understand my accent!

Every time I get in an Uber in L.A., they're like, 'Oh, great accent. Are you from Australia?' I constantly have to repeat myself when I'm in North America because no one understands a word I'm saying.

Your hair looks funny," Lief said, as soon as the Ugloids left. "It stands straight up!" No," said Nick, intensely irritated, "It's hanging straight down." Lief just gave him an upside-down shrug. "Up is down in China and you're part-Chinese.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other.

I was planning on starting a new file on my computer with the title "Phrases That Sound One Way to Witches but Mean Something Else to Vampires.

I know that when people pull apart, they usually employ misunderstanding as a weapon, deliberately getting hold of the stick's wrong end, impaling themselves on its point in order to prove the perfidy of the other.

I went into a butchers and I said, 'I'll have a pound of sausages. 'He said, 'I'm very sorry, sir, we only serve kilos in here. 'I said, 'Okay then I'll have a pound of kilos.'

The English language on her tongue became a smoke-screen, without her eyes changing expression in the least.