Peter Sis Quotes

Maybe to feel like an Afghan I needed to be born and raised in the States, and maybe I needed to live in Afghanistan for nearly a decade to feel like an American. Both worlds shaped me, but neither one of them completely correspond to the picture I have of myself.

Immigrants to the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into their new country and reshape their identities accordingly.

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

I wanted to do comedy because I left Malaysia and went to America. I got bitten by the Western, idealist, opinionated, democracy bug.

I'm excited to share my experience as an immigrant assimilating to a new country and an outsider stumbling my way into Hollywood.

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 see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

I'm born and raised in Mexico. I only spent eight months in the States, but definitely English is a really big part of my life, and I love it. Thank God my mom put me in American school because I'm able to be working in the States, and it opens a lot more doors being half and not being only one. It's cool because I get to turn it on and off.

My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.

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

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

In some ways. I always feel between worlds, between cultures, and I think that's not necessarily a bad place for a writer to be. Writers are kind of on the fringe anyway, observing, writing things down. I'm still mostly American, but it's a nice tension.

I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.

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.

I was a redhead when I first came to America.

I was born in Costa Rica and we moved to America where it was a whole new world for me.

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.

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.

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

I'm half Egyptian, and I'm Muslim. But I grew up in Canada, far from my Arab roots. Like so many who straddle East and West, I've been drawn, over the years, to try to better understand my origins.

Nostalgia is a particular affliction of immigrant fiction, and it's led to a kind of sclerosis of the form. I hate nostalgia, and I feel it's good to be aware of the politics of these genres.

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.

Latinas who come to the U.S. should adapt, learn English and become a part of the community.

Every acquisition of accommodation becomes material for assimilation, but assimilation always resists new accommodations.

I'm fascinated by how ethnic communities have assimilated into massive capitalist environments.