Jacques Derrida Quotes

I write about outsiders. I write about people who are outside and don't know quite how to get in because it's how I've always felt.

I usually play disenfranchised youth.

I've always been an outsider; a displaced person.

If you don't belong somewhere, that outsider status you have gives you perspective. Of course, another word for outsider is 'exile,' and that's not fun at all.

We remain the saddest little district of the world, the most miserable people of the world, losing our own persona and not being able to take on anyone else's, torn away and not accepted, alien to all and everyone, including those with whom we are most closely related, but who will not recognize us as their kin. We live on a divide between worlds, at the border between nations, always at a fault to someone and first to be struck. Waves of history strike us as a sea cliff.

No matter what you eventually become - free, empowered - the lingering feeling of 'once an outsider, always an outsider' is very vivid for me.

I am a marked person, and no one who's unmarked is going to understand that. It's very intimidating. I don't even know what my place is anymore. What's my role in society? Who am I, after everybody has branded me?

I suppose when you are an outsider, you will always be an outsider.

I think everyone can feel like an outsider. I know I have. I've always felt like one.

I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.

I never felt at home in London, because people were constantly telling me I didn't belong here, so after a while, you tend to believe that.

I want every character be an outsider in some way.

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

A poor man is like a foreigner in his own country.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong.

I never really had any close friends in India, and I felt a terrible loneliness and isolation for many years. Westernized Indians don't like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians - so we're quits.

I'm stuck somewhere a small island in the middle of the Atlantic where I'm alone. Because in France, they're like, 'No, you're not like us, you're not a French guy.' And in America, they're like, 'You're not like us.' I'm really alone in my little thing.

As a kid I just felt like an outsider.

At Yves Saint Laurent, I felt like the son-in-law - like I was part of the family, but not quite. When I was fired, I felt like the widow.

There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.

At some point in our lives there's something about every one of us that makes us feel like an outsider, I believe.

America feels like home as much as it does here. Although it's a strange situation as I feel almost like I'm in no-man's land some of the time, because although I'm a resident, I still can't vote so I don't really have a say in what goes on where I live.

Almost overnight, white people have gone from being very powerful to potentially irrelevant. Their future in South Africa is not what many had envisaged, so it involves a lot of reinvention.

The elite isn't leading anymore. It's trapped.

Part of the reason why people get radicalized is because they feel they are disenfranchised; that they not there; that they are bullied. But if they are represented, they can't go and say to themselves: 'Oh, this society hates us!'