Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
So many different countries have got their version of what Merlin is: the Scottish say he Scottish, the Welsh say he's Welsh, the French say he's French.
English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish football gains so much from being in Europe. Clubs and fans all benefit from European action, laws and funding.
I have an American trainer - a bubbly Californian. I tell her, 'Welsh women don't run. We're congenitally incapable.' But she's got me up to five kilometers.
I thought the first Welsh team I played in was the golden generation, with Neville Southall, Mark Hughes, Ian Rush, Dean Saunders, Gary Speed, and Ryan Giggs.
My mum, Olwen, was a bright and talkative woman who loved a gossip and a story and was given slightly to malapropisms. And she was Welsh, so, of course, she sang.
I like to think I'm a bit of a son of the country, I've played for the country so many times I feel proud to be Welsh. It's accepted me for what I am and what I do.
Welsh rugby has done its dirty washing in public. It's nothing new. We're a tribal bunch. If warring parties want to sway public opinion, they do it in the public arena.
I think now, more than anytime I can remember, bands are sounding pretty similar whether they're English or American, from Manchester or London... or Leeds or Welsh or Irish.
Most Americans don't even know that Minnie Driver is English or that Catherine Zeta Jones is Welsh, but people are reminded every time 'ER' is shown that I'm the British Dr. Corday.
Being Welsh means you sometimes get exposed to international football earlier. Again, that helps player development, speeds up their thought process in a different kind of environment.
Growing up in Wales, there was a lot of fervour about being Welsh. But the more that I travelled, I realised that people aren't always interested in where you're from, but who you are.
The Welsh have everywhere adopted the Cymric tongue; they hug themselves in the belief that they are pure descendants of the ancient Britons, but in fact, they are rather Silurians than Celts.
I was shocked by the amount of Welsh people in L.A. We'd go to this British pub to watch the 'Six Nations' early in the morning and I remember the first time I walked in it was just a sea of red.
The 'Weston' is actually my middle name. I hyphenated it because I really wasn't willing to go out in the acting world as 'Tom Jones,' 'cause I'm Welsh as well, so the connotation is just ridiculous.
There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia.
One of my greatest sadnesses at the prospective break-up of the Union is that it will set English, Welsh and Northern Irish against Scots in a bitter division of the debts and resources of the whole of the U.K.
I see myself as a different sort of Welsh. Because we are from Cardiff, we see Wales as Cardiff. This is Wales; outside Cardiff is beyond. It's a strange one. You are really Welsh, but you're not, if you know what I mean.
I regret not paying a bit more attention to Welsh lessons at school. My Welsh is pretty ropey, as back at my school, people didn't take Welsh lessons seriously. My dad can speak it, so I wish he'd taught me some growing up.
I grew up in Shropshire, but I was born in Wales. There was a hospital seven miles away, but my dad drove 45 miles over the Welsh border so I could play rugby for Wales. But as a skinny asthmatic, I was only ever good at swimming.
You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.
The history of the Welsh, the Irish, the Highlanders, is just the same as that of the Gauls, one of internecine feud, no political cohesion, no capacity for merging private interests, forgetting private grudges for a patriotic cause.
The country I live in is never clear about its name. My passport says 'the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,' and citizens of the U.K. may call themselves British, English, Scottish, Welsh or from Northern Ireland.
When I moved to Wales more than twenty years ago and began to research 'Here Be Dragons,' I was fascinated from the first by the Welsh medieval laws, by the discovery that women enjoyed a greater status in Wales than elsewhere in Europe.
I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.
The best way to prepare for a night out with a Shakespearean tragedy is to do a bit of reading up in the afternoon, eat a light supper - perhaps Welsh rarebit - and then arrive early to do some stretching exercises in the foyer before curtain-up.
From what I've read, everyone has a claim on Merlin. Was he Scottish, Welsh, English or even French? All these countries have got a big claim on him and Camelot. That's why the Arthurian legends are so popular - because they are such good stories.
For me as a Welsh actor, Richard Burton is one of my biggest idols. And I've got so many: Peter O'Toole, Laurence Olivier and Oliver Reed. If they got 'Hunky Dory' and 'Citadel' offered to them, they would do completely different jobs on both of them.
In the 1990s, from the estates of Scotland came the phenomenon of Irvine Welsh. 'Trainspotting' demanded its place not only in the high ranks of contemporary fiction but as a describer of a Britain that literally and metaphorically was in a deep mess.
Many of the Victorian and Edwardian activists who campaigned for Irish home rule, for instance, also wanted what they called 'home rule all round': separate parliaments not simply for Ireland but also for the Scots and the Welsh - and for the English.
When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'
Welsh is my mother tongue, and my children speak it. If you come and live in this community you'll work out pretty quickly that it's beneficial to learn the language, because if you're going to the pub or a cafe you need to be a part of the local life.
I went to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, which was great but very different from a typical university. They sat us down in the first week and said: if you want to party, you've come to the wrong place. There was no lie-ins or skipping lectures.
I still dream about that one opportunity where the Welsh Rugby Union call me up and say, 'We need you.' There is an incredibly talented Welsh hooker called Matthew Rees, so maybe some incredible quirk of misfortune for him would mean I get called up instead.
Everyone I know is fervently proud to be Welsh but you try not to be preachy about it. It's difficult at times. But when I go home to north Wales, or to somewhere I've never been in south Wales, I still feel at home because I'm in Wales. It's hard to explain.
Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.
I've been lucky that I've performed with a lot of the classical people I've wanted to work with so I'd like to do something that people didn't see coming. Like Madonna, or being Welsh - the Tom Jones thing. Or somebody suggested N-Dubz - that would be brilliant!
I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.
Welsh voices and Welsh communities were heard in 2016 in their tens of thousands, in their droves. They voted to leave the European Union and since then they have had that slapped in their face actually often by Labour MPs who basically said we know better than you.
Some accents people - internationally - can't understand, also they come with baggage. London means a certain thing, Liverpool means a certain thing. Whereas with Welsh, he can be a middle-class man with working-class roots and still have an accent and it not be an issue.
I think most of the world would like to be Scottish. All the Americans who come here never look for English blood or Welsh, only for Scottish and Irish. It's understandable. The Scots effectively created the face of the modern world: the railways, the bridges, the tunnels.
When I started in the profession, there were very visible actors who were Scottish, Welsh, or regional. Lots of working-class-hero leading actors; it was not fashionable to sound posh. Now, I'm middle-aged; it's fashionable to sound posh if you are the generation behind me.
It's funny because when you're a Welshman living in England, you always get the mickey taken out of you for being Welsh, and then when you go to Wales with an English accent because you were born in Bristol and grew up in Birmingham, they say you're English. You can never win.
The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.
I've done my coaching badges, I've got my Pro Licence, but I enjoy what I'm doing now. I'm also the elite performance director of the Welsh FA. The main thing for me was always Liverpool Football Club and my country, Wales - and I'm lucky enough to still be involved with both of them.
In Ehrenfeld, we were all jammed together. All the fathers were foreign-born - Welsh, Irish, Polish, Sicilian. We were so jammed together, we picked up each other's accents. And we spoke some broken English. When I got into the service, people used to think I was from a foreign country.
In 1977, while I was performing in a play in Cardiff, a friend introduced me to a striking redhead called Myfanwy Talog, famed for her appearances on Welsh television with the comedy duo Rees and Ronnie. We were instantly smitten and eventually moved in together, sharing 18 happy years.
At most grounds you're not particularly conscious of the crowd but in Cardiff, with the roof closed against a good Welsh team, the noise is impossible to ignore. It can be loud enough to put you off your game and the Welsh undoubtedly possess some of the most passionate fans in the world.
It was a proof of Welsh good nature: so long as I had a friend that knew and could introduce me, the whole Welsh people would do anything to entertain, and would even neglect their business to do so. But as a stranger in Wales, it is difficult to break through their suspicion and mistrust.
I do what I can, but I'll always give it a shot. You're not going to see me playing a Welsh character any time soon, not because I wouldn't love to. I went up to Wales once and read for a film with Rhys Ifans, and haven't been asked back since. We did have a nice time on the train on the way back.
Years later, when I was working as a trolley wally in a supermarket, I tackled the boredom by talking to the customers in as many different accents as I could manage. I started with one that I didn't think would alert any suspicion - generic Asian - then moved on to Irish, Welsh, Australian and American.