Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Speech and having a stammer is obviously a big part of my life.
Liars do look you in the eye. They do not always stutter, stammer, blush or fidget.
This stammer got me a home in Beverly Hills, and I'm not about to screw with it now.
I had this terrible stammer, so I couldn't really speak properly until I was 16 or 17.
The stammer was a way of telling the world that he was not like others, a way of expressing his singularity.
I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.
I've been told to speed up my delivery when I perform. But if I lose the stammer, I'm just another slightly amusing accountant.
I knew all about Edward VIII's abdication, George VI becoming the king and having a stammer, but nothing about how he got rid of it.
Breathing is fundamental to speech. A stammer is caused by erratic airflow, so if you have a smooth airflow, you have smooth speech.
Living with a stammer is difficult. It's a daily uphill struggle with emotional baggage weighing you down. You can't be the person you want to be.
Men think they already know me. But as they get closer and closer, they become that 14-year-old again. A lot of men do stammer and blush a little bit.
From my earliest days I have enjoyed an attractive impediment in my speech. I have never permitted the use of the word stammer. I can't say it myself.
No one knows for sure if you can inherit a stammer, and so I worry that my baby might. It's why I want to work on my speech before he arrives. I don't want him to hear me stammer.
I think three or four years ago, people would have said my biggest weakness was that sometimes I was awkward on television, with my stammer, but I think they'd say that much less now.
I've stammered all my life, and it's fair to say that my stammer has shaped my life. It's made me make some decisions that I'm sure I wouldn't have if I didn't suffer with this affliction.
If we discovered that we only had five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.
I had a stammer through adolescence. Any fun I'd had performing in school plays disappeared and only came back at 18, when the stammer started to go. Then I thought: 'Well, perhaps I can show off now.'
What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.
I still have a stammer that I can control by not opening a sentence with a hard consonant, or by concentrating for a moment, breathing softly down. Growing up, the 'Our Father' was lovely, made for me, the 'Hail Mary' was gorgeous, and 'Glory Be to the Father' was an absolute nightmare.
I have such bad memories, sitting in the back of a classroom, being told, you know, everybody is going to read a paragraph, and skipping ahead to my paragraph and being mortified and trying to read it enough times so that I wouldn't stutter and stammer, getting called on, even in high school.
Before all this happened, I always used to see my stammer as being a negative, all my life, but then when I went on 'Pop Idol,' and the first time I saw it on television, it was really, really bad, but also it made me stand out; it made people remember me. So for the first time in my life, it worked to my advantage.
