Wayne Kramer Quotes

Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.

If I were king of the world there wouldn't be boat people, there would only be people coming in boats. I would mix us all up so that we were all exactly one shade of each other.

I hear that melting-pot stuff a lot, and all I can say is that we haven't melted.

I am constantly swimming on the margin, neither 100% American, French, nor Lebanese. I am none of those. I am the result of those three. Sometimes it's an asset: no one can put you in a category. That I do not make typical Lebanese, European or American films does not bother me.

Being married to a daughter of India is a natural complement of my being in this country for 30 years. My roots are very much in this country, even though I remain a Westerner.

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

I had to marry a Greek; I had to stir up the ethnic pot. Otherwise, my children would have been anemic and sickly. Now they've got some good Mediterranean blood in them.

The melting pot has sprung a leak.

Assimilation is what has made America great.

Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels.

The Melting Pot

I take the best of all the styles I like and put them together in one package.

The Irish fought the Italians until they started marrying them. And then they both fought the Jews until they started marrying them.

I feel like I've mixed my Middle Eastern and Western loves together.

Few of us doubt that stealing is wrong, especially from the poor. But the accusation of 'cultural appropriation' is overwhelmingly being used as an objection to syncretism - the mixing of different thoughts, religions, cultures, and ethnicities that often ends up creating entirely new ones.

I mix things from my Somali culture and my American side.

I was interested in cross-pollinating the two. I thought there was something lovely in the little vignette forms. I wanted to explore that.

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.

To be a mass tourist, for me,...is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Most people are on the world, not in it.

I would say that Catholics came in and competed with the Protestant work ethic. That is one thing. And they did assimilate into the broader society and a lot of them, especially Irish Catholic did their best to sound like they were English rather than Irish by dropping and the O and the apostrophe.

Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.

Our Muslim friends must learn from previous waves of immigration.

In other words, my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America.

When we [people] are operating from the belief that we're not connected, it feels so dangerous and scary and vulnerable and awful.