Glenn Ligon Quotes

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

We are Martians who have come to earth to change everything—and we are afraid we will not be so well received. So we try to keep it a secret, try to appear as Americans…But that we could not do because of our accent. So we settled in a country nobody ever has heard about and now we are claiming to be Hungarians.

In Geneva, I was seen as an outsider. In the U.S., I was considered Eurotrash. And in London, I'm seen as an American.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

I think of myself as an Indian comedian, but I've had British and American schooling. I always had this feeling of not fitting in anywhere, of observing situations from the outside.

I'm Asian-American, and I was the only Chinese girl growing up in a white school in San Diego. So I understood what it was like to be different, to always want to fit in and never feel like you ever could.

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture.

When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

When I was growing up, I always felt a bit like I didn't quite fit in, a feeling that perhaps still lingers in the background to this very day. I was the small brown girl in the big white suburb.

During my childhood in Cyprus, the British talked about the Cypriots as if the Cypriots were outsiders in their own country. And even though I was born in Cyprus, my parents were American, and so I was an outsider in the land of my birth.

I'm an immigrant, and I think being an outsider in your home is something that I really relate to.

We moved around a lot when I was younger. I never really felt at home until we moved to Canada, but even then, I always felt strangely out of place and alien.

As I got older, I realised that people saw me as other things - sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood, I started to see myself as 'other', this amorphous category. I didn't even know what 'not other' was, but I knew I wasn't it; I wasn't what was normal.

Writing in English made me become a foreigner in my own country. It helped me create the necessary distance to my homeland.

I'm a little bit older, I've traveled the world, spent lots of time in New York and Paris and lots of inspiring places, and I still feel alien.

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

I speak only one language, and it is not my own.

When you come back to a country that you've left, you're in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don't belong to that country any more, even though when I'm in America I feel I don't belong there either.

The trouble with me is that I'm an outsider. And that's a very hard thing to be in American life.

If one will always have to feel white first, and African second, it would be better not to stay on in Africa

Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.