Life
His father was originally from South Africa, and his mother was English; he has two younger brothers. After a childhood in poverty, he studied languages and taught himself Gregg Shorthand. Having learned Welsh, he was interviewed in Welsh on radio; he has a reasonable knowledge of ten different languages. He was apparently approached by the Home Office to work on speaker identification but turned down the offer as it was still considered unacceptable to be homosexual at the time, and he feared that the security check would make his homosexuality public.
Read more about this topic: John C. Wells
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.”
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)
“For Jeremy, direct, unmediated experience was always hard to take in, always more or less disquieting. Life became safe, things assumed meaning, only when they had been translated into words and confined between the covers of a book.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The minutes wing’d their way wi’ pleasure:
Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,
O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious!”
—Robert Burns (1759–1796)