Language Vs Writers

1. The English Language has been taken over, or taken to heart, or taken to tongue, by people whose original language historically it was not
British Novelist of indian origin, Vickrem Seth

2. The beauty of the English Language is that no body watches over it. It is allowed to blossom like an enchanting hybrid.
Ana del Corral, Cardiff, Wales

3. Q 'States of Emergency" was written in English. Have you stopped writing in Afrikaans?
A. No. Writing is an extremely private thing, & one of my main reasons for writing 'States of Emergency" in English was because it was an autobiographical account of a very painful experience. Using English gave me a certain distance. But I will continue to write in Afrikaans. It's easier to express myself & it's an adventure working in a young language
South African novelist Andre Brink

4. When he won the Nobel Prize, Bashevis Singer called YIDDISH "a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world.....
In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise & humble language of us all, the idiom of the frightened & hopeful humanity.
He went on to note that Yiddish contains no words "for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics." For Singer, Yiddish was not only a language but a way of life.
In the Yiddish mentality, there is 'gratitude for everyday of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love...It does not demand & command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for creation is still at the begining.

5. Speaking a foreign language, we cannot so easily speak our minds, but we do willy-nilly speak our hearts. We grow more direct in another tongue say the things we would not say at home-as if, you might say, we were under a foreign influence.
Inhibitions are the first thing to get lost in translation: "Je t'aime" comes much more easily than "I love you"
Small wonder, perhaps that spies are gifted linguists by nature as well as by training (John le Carre was one of the most brilliant language students of his day) : entering another another tongue, we steal into another self.
And even when we're not speaking Spanish but only English that a spaniard will understand, the effect is just as rejuvenating.
How vivid the cliche "over the hill" sounds when we're explaining it to an Osaka businessman? How rich the idiom "raining cats & dogs!"
Speaking English as a second language, we find ourselves rethinking ourselves, simplifying ourselves, committed, for once, not to making impressive sentences but just to making sense.
English is the official language of the European Free Trade Association, though none of its six members has English as its mother tongue. Why? Well, says the secretary -general disarmingly, "using English means we don't talk too much, since none of knows the nuances"
Pico Iyer

6. ...So I believe the plain style in English relates to a number of characteristics which are innate in the national culture.
It relates to the pragmatic quality, both of English philosophy, & of English life.
It relates to the sense of moderation;
it relates to the English dislike, or distrust, of extremism of all kinds;
it relates to the high value & virtue which the English believe is derived from naturalness-the desire to have a moderate form of nature, not nature red in tooth & claw, but nature modified, controlled, restrained.
These writers often produce language which is of great beauty, but it is beauty of a subtle kind;
it is beauty which arrives not out of emphasis, but out of soft & gentle modulations designed to increase the precision of meaning.
It is, I believe, one of the great themes of the life of the English nation, that we have had so many writers on such a wide variety of subjects, who have been able to use the English language in so natural, & so plain a way.
William Rees-Mogg