Hisham Matar Quotes

It's funny because I'm so used to acting in English that any time I have these moments where I have to speak Russian, it definitely takes a different part of my brain to pull it off, but it's always nice and fun.

I so want to be able to speak another language. I love the way my friends who are half Italian and half English break from one language into another without even pausing.

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

In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limitation that I have to work around and I have to use it to my favor. So, yes, that's why I end up wanting to do more things in Latin America.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.

Even if I think in English, it's more a language of acting than French.

I speak English without an accent, and I speak Spanish without an accent. I really do have the best of both worlds.

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.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

I spoke Spanish when I was three, and then Maltese. I love dictionaries. I like foreigners. My dad moved every year before I was 14, and I learnt to like abroad. I'm not scared of change.

My mom used to call me a parrot, because the way I spoke would change in every country we'd go to.

We spoke French at home and I didn't know any English until I went to school. My mother was French and met my father when he visited France as a student on a teaching placement.

French was my first 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!

I studied in American school, so yes, I grew up speaking English and Spanish. Obviously, Spanish is my first language.

I speak English with my dad and Swedish with my mom; it's quite schizophrenic.

All my mom's side speaks Spanish. I speak to my grandparents in Spanish. Slowly. And they're patient with me! But I do speak with them in Spanish and carry on conversations with them.

I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it.

Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether.

I learned Punjabi before I learned English in spite of the fact that I was born in Canada.

Since I grew up in Palakkad, I am comfortable speaking both Tamil and Malayalam.

I grew up speaking Arabic at home.

I use Mandarin, Korean and English on a daily basis and usually only use Cantonese when I'm speaking with my relatives. I don't think it's very difficult for me to switch between each language because I've been doing it for so long.

Hindi has never been a trouble. In fact, Hindi is the only language I can speak and write apart from Malayalam and English.