Gad Elmaleh Quotes

I came here when I was almost 22. I'm perfectly bilingual, but I'm never going to sound like Sandra Bullock.

I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.

Neither of my parents had English as a first language.

I speak English, so I am no longer cute. My tongue itches for French.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

It's a complicated process being so bilingual. Sometimes it's a mere word or sentence that comes to me, if I'm writing the book in English, in French. It's not always easy to deal with. Sometimes even during an interview somebody can ask me a question in English that I want to answer in French and vice versa - that's the story of my life!

When I was a kid, I resented my grandparents not speaking the perfect English I wanted to speak.

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.

Even though many Indians can read or speak English, for most, it is not their first language. At the office, we speak in English, but we consume our culture in our own language.

The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.

Talking in one language and talking in another, I think inevitably, produce two different personalities, as far as I've seen in other people. I assume it does the same for me.

It is asked of me that I give my first speech in this house in a language [English] other than my mother tongue [French.] …. Even if I knew English as intimately as I knew French, I would still give my first speech in the language of my French Canadian compatriots

I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.

I was hesitant about doing too big a role in an American movie because it meant losing my German accent.

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

My mother tongue is Telugu. I was born and brought up in Tamil Nadu.

I haven't even grown up on Hindi films because my Hindi is bad; I am a Parsi and we speak English or Gujarati at home.

I have three championships in a country where I don't speak the language.

It's really natural for me to write bilingually.

Nothing in my younger life could have told me I would have needed to know how to speak English.

I think in my mother tongue. That's Hindi.