William Klein Quotes

People don't know what it's like being the foreigner until they are one.

I feel displaced when I'm back in America, like a visitor. I feel like if I don't get a cup of tea I'm going to lose my mind.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

I never did very well as an immigrant. I've lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.

My life experiences are different than the average person because I've spent the last 10 years living in Mexico. I generally don't know what's going on in America, and when I do visit for work, I'm often interrogated about my life choices by random strangers.

When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

I've always felt more at home in the UK than in France.

If you take my own life, the longer you stay in a country, you almost lose your former self and become this third-party person who is caught in between two worlds.

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

I'm French - it's less important. Meaning, I remain a Frenchman in America, but I adapt to American culture. I feel good there - but I'm still a foreigner.

I think the Aussieness got beaten out of me back in the States.

There are just more roles for me in America. Sadly. Because I love working in Britain. It's my home.

When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States.

I always felt that I wasn't as American as Americans and then I realised when I got back to the Philippines that I was not Filipino.

I was actually born and raised in Puerto Rico. I moved to the States when I was 19. I was very impressed early on by being around people who spoke my language and ate the same food and listened to the same music, dressed the same. But then you look around and, you know, you're not in Puerto Rico.

I miss being in my home country; here, I'm always a foreigner. America is, of course, built of people who are not from here. But going home, even just landing at Arlanda, the Stockholm airport, I think, "This is where I'm from. These people are my people."

I used to wonder how a man of birth and spirit could endure to be wholly insignificant and obscure in a foreign country, when he might live with lustre in his own.

What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.

A Texan outside of Texas is a foreigner.

America as a setting seems inexhaustibly fascinating to me, and I think there's something about the outsider viewpoint that works for me. Being of Jewish descent in England always carried a vague sense of being foreign, while not being a practicing Jew made it hard to think of myself as fully Jewish either. So living here in a way just clarifies that terminal outsider position - makes it somehow official, which I like.

I lived in England for a long time, and even the English didn't think me as one of theirs. In America I'm not really accepted. In New Zealand now, I don't think they even think of me as a New Zealander.

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

Growing up in America, I never really appreciated my culture. I knew what being Hispanic was, but I thought that since I didn't look Hispanic, I was white.

I'd like to come back to the West eventually. In the end abroad I am always a stranger, active politics in particular is not accessible to me and although people are generous, I can never be on the inside of a culture that relies a great deal on the private space and the family.