Tea Obreht Quotes

I love the Middle East. My earliest childhood memories are of Jerusalem. I love the colors and smells and cadence of Arabic spoken in the streets of Cairo or Beirut. I also love the modernity and verve of Tel Aviv.

A Mediterranean city is really my culture.

My memories of my childhood are wonderful memories. I feel that I was privileged because I grew up in a beautiful city. It is Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily. It's a place filled with sun, close to the beach.

Marseilles, Barcelona, Trieste, Istanbul - each romances the Mediterranean in its own fashion, mostly by embracing the sea in sweeping C-shaped bays that date back to antiquity.

My parents moved from ranch to ranch, valley to valley, town to town, but our roots in Fowler never really faded. For me, it's a place of history, stories and songs, not just facts and figures.

I went to an international school in Holland, and I didn't have any memories of growing up in the United States or England or any of these places which other novelists are able to write about in relation to their childhoods.

I miss aspects of being in the Arab world - the language - and there is a tranquility in these cities with great rivers. Whether it's Cairo or Baghdad, you sit there and you think, 'This river has flown here for thousands of years.' There are magical moments in these places.

I've been waiting over 40 years to come to Cyprus, and it has not disappointed - the birthplace of Aphrodite, the Crossroads of Civilization, and, I might add, a genuine strategic partner to the United States of America.

People wonder why I love Africa so much. I say this is where I was born and raised. My roots are in Africa; that's were I developed.

I have a lot of cultural references that have amassed in my brain like shrapnel over the years that are meaningful to me.

I was born in Paris, and my mother was a French teacher, but then I rebelled against my upbringing and studied Spanish in school. So now I just speak bad French and bad Spanish.

I grew up in the Middle East. My folks have a very thick, kind of Oklahoma accent; that's where I was born. But we moved to the Middle East right after I was born, so I guess we were surrounded by English people and French people.

When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.

Thankfully, we didn't stop at Malta. I think Malta was thankful, too.

It's really hard to escape where you were brought up. Not that I would ever want to escape it.

While I was born in Singapore, I didn't actually grow up here. So I don't remember all that much.

My father is Moroccan and I have fond childhood memories of holidays there.

I'm a Muslim Egyptian-American, born in Cairo. I grew up in Kuwait until the first Gulf War, when my family relocated to the United Arab Emirates. As an adult, I studied and lived in the U.K. before moving to Boston.

I think Malta is great for a song. It's got very nice and narrow roads with beaches. So if you personally ask me, I would shoot action there. It can be very exciting since there's water all around and there can be boat chases. Even travel films like 'Before Sunset' can be shot there.

As a student I travelled around the Mediterranean - the Greek islands and Salerno on the south coast of Italy.

I don't think I related to the Irish Catholic surroundings that was my environment when I was growing up.

I think it's about the feeling more than a language. And I think that we and every culture in the world has to keep their own language just to bring something else, something different, and show a different vision of the world, actually. And that's why I'm trying to keep my language.

Barcelona is a beautiful city. I love the buildings and the architecture and always enjoy being close to that. It makes sense as an art person to work in places like that, it always feels nice and creative.

All my father's stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho.

I grew up in East Los Angeles, which is the biggest population of Mexican-Americans in America. I was born and raised there.