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Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.

My children are English, and both of their mothers were English.

A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.

Realistically, English is a universal language; it's the number one language for music and for communicating with the rest of the world.

You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?

I wanted to write for all children, even those kids who might see language as a threatening thing, even if English is their second language.

Every German child learns to speak English in school.

Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.

Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.

English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.