Sharlto Copley Quotes

I have no idea how I'm perceived in America because I don't live the reality of America.

In America, people really struggle with my name, so I don't have a nickname as such. I've had Sharlito, Sheldon, Charldo, really interesting variations on the name. Some of them can get it, but many can't.

In France, I am just Madame Campbell. In Jamaica, nobody uses my title.

Try and fit in in a New Zealand playground with an Armagh accent - it doesn't work.

I know a lot of Americans in Paris who have married Frenchmen. They keep bringing up their experience, the clash of civilizations, the clash of personalities.

When I go home to England, my friends all make fun of me for sounding American.

I'm very happy to be a foreigner in Japan, and I can't think of a more wonderful place to live, but at the same time, I would never want to be Japanese, because they are subject to stresses that I am not.

In school, nobody could pronounce my name. They just called me Rocky.

My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself 'the American' at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.

A lot of people don't think I'm English. I've lived in France, and people do think I'm French, but I don't see myself as having a glamorous look.

To be a foreigner may be an advantage but disadvantage as well. It was advantage for me for sure.

I was very surprised when I first started spending time in America. The culture shock was something I wasn't prepared for. I had a lot of work to do to try to begin to understand this enormous and complex country that I thought would be an easy process.

We are taking our culture and suturing it to America. Like gum on the bottom of a shoe, we are not going to disappear. Unlike other peoples who totally assimilated, we are more interested in co-assimilation.

I was born Moishe Ketzelbourd but the Indians call me Maurice Cougar.

So it was constantly going back and forth between these two cultures that kept raising the question, well, how important is personal freedom? And I think that has always been of interest to me.

Mexicans who come to America today end up opposing assimilation. They say they are "holding on to their culture." To them, I say, "If you really wanted to hold on to your culture, you would be in favor of assimilation. You would be fearless about swallowing English and about becoming Americanized. You would be much more positive about the future, and much less afraid. That's what it means to be Mexican.

You know if you're in Rome, live in the Roman way. I grew up there, I was born there, and so I should follow its guidelines, live like a Korean. And I really love Korea. I grew up listening to Korean music, and was able to get to where I am because of it.

I'm opposed to wearing headscarves in public places. That's not France. There's something I just don't understand: the people who come to France, why would they want to change France, to live in France the same way they lived back home?

Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way ('Ni-klows Wirt'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nick-les Worth'. This is to say that Europeans call me by name, but Americans call me by value.

Quit calling me Grey. It makes me sound like I’m a boy. Like Dorian Gray.” “Dorian who?” I sighed. “Just think up something else. Plain old Nora works too, you know.” “Sure thing, Gumdrop.” I grimaced. “I take that back. Let’s stick with Grey.

We are American at puberty. We die French.

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.

I left the Midwest thinking I didn't fit in. But when I got to New York, I realized how truly Midwestern I was.

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our gross public to make up for the lack on the aesthetic side. One's friends are delightful; but we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass-house, the most displaced and useless class on earth!

I went to Paris in 1989 when the Americans didn't quite know what to do with me at first. Now, all those years later, it's kind of the same story. Not the same scenario, but kind of the same story.