Amitava Kumar Quotes

I'm a nomad. A Jewish road warrior. I do not have a concept of home. I wish I did. But I live with the idea that we have to get out of town before dawn.

My family moved a lot as a kid. We started in Colorado, where I lived for five years. We moved to Chicago for two years, to San Francisco for one year, Connecticut for seven, Oregon for a couple years, and then I went to school. So I was always moving, I'm still always moving.

I live in too many cities.

I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong.

I see myself as a transient, not an immigrant.

I went to 13 schools in 12 years. We moved all over the place. Music was the only thing that I could get behind... I wasn't that good at socializing. I'm still not.

I am not quite sure where home is right now. I do have places in London and Milan, and a house in Spain. I guess I would say home is where my mother is, and she lives in Spain.

Just like my parents immigrated from ranch to ranch picking crops, I have migrated from city to city.

It was the rootlessness that went with being the son of an RAF officer that shaped me. I had been to 11 schools by the time I was 9.

Home is where I am. Sadly, I don't need a history to be able to exist somewhere. When I was still very young, my father told me: 'Look, we will always have to move, again and again.' I thought that was marvelous! That's how I got used to thinking that life meant starting from scratch, over and over again.

I don't have a place that I call home at the moment because there's no point. I mean, I'm a traveling circus for a while. It's weird. Like, if I wanted to go home, there's nowhere to go. I just go to a hotel. But I've kind of gotten used to it.

I basically live out of my truck - I mean from place to place. I feel more at home in my truck than just about anywhere, which is a sad thing to say, but it's true.

I am realising this now more as I grow up: that I never really felt connected to locations. In some sense, I always kind of felt a little lost in that I never had any hometown pride. While I experience a lot different places and experiences, I always felt a little detached.

When I look at my own work, I see love, loss, and loneliness. Part of it might be that I was an army brat. I moved around all the time. There was a sense of nothing being permanent.

I've stopped wanting a home, I think, because I've been on tour all my life, basically.

I tell people I'm from all over Brooklyn because I never stayed in one part of Brooklyn.

I don't really feel an allegiance to any of the countries I have lived in, even though I feel like part of them, and part of them is in me.

After a certain age, you couldn't even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else.

I kinda grew up in different places. I was just from everywhere.

By the time I was seven, my mother and I had moved 13 times.

My dad didn't like staying in one place, so we moved around every year - to a new house, new town, new country.

I've very aware of my rootlessness.

I was on the beach, and I was just thinking to myself that I have no one place where I actually feel like I'm at home. I came up with the idea of having no roots - never being grounded to a certain place but having your home with people who you love.

I actually didn't think there was that many people out there who knew what it's like to not really have a home or have that home in one place.

Living with the notion that you might never have a permanent spot in the world is really quite a powerful metaphor.