Carlos Fuentes Quotes

I'm completely English, but I grew up in Paris and went to school here. My parents moved when I was five.

Well, I grew up between Holland and Israel and then moved to France when I was eleven.

I am always asked, 'You grew up in Africa?' Every time I introduce a film, or I'm interviewed, 'You grew up in Africa?'

I'm a third-culture child. It's an interesting concept. Having an American father, a South American mother, born in England, grew up in Hong Kong, went to school in Europe - it makes me a third-culture child, which means you take on the culture of the place where you live. So I'm very adaptable.

Only when I came to America did I think of myself as British.

I was born here in the States. I moved to Portugal when I was five. And then my parents put me in an English school.

I am an American citizen born in Kuwait of Egyptian parents. I grew up in Great Britain, Malaysia, and Egypt and have lived in the United States since 1965, when I was seventeen.

My parents were born abroad. I was born in France, but I feel comfortable everywhere - I don't see the borders.

I actually grew up in Europe half my life. Then Canada, then the States.

A lot of the attitude I used to have about being from New York when I was younger just disappeared when I started to the rest of the world.

Yeah, I'm from North Carolina, but grew up in Eastern Europe, and became a woman in London.

Even though my parents are American, I spent my whole childhood and adolescence abroad.

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.

I was born in France. I grew up in Africa.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don't think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

I wanted to acknowledge my U.S. heritage and to belong to it more closely. Having said that, I am certainly British by formation and education and readily think of London as home. I had never lived in the U.S. till 2007.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

I had a very peripatetic childhood, so I bounced around. Lived in Ethiopia until I was, like, three or four and then lived between Ireland and London.

My mom is from Venezuela, and my dad is German and Japanese, and we lived in Brazil when I was a kid for a couple of years, and then I grew up on Long Island. I think all the traveling and all the nationalities put that stuff in my head. I was just around it a lot.

I love being a foreigner.

Getting some distance allowed me to develop a hunger for India and to come back and explore it in a way I wouldn't have had I been living here. And that probably made me more political as well.

I see myself as a transient, not an immigrant.

I seem to be known as much by the moniker 'Mrs Funnybones' as my own name these days. The book was about how a modern woman looks at India and how India looks right back at her. I am glad that India seems to be looking back at me with a grin.

I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It's part of who I am as well.

Having grown up in different countries - Jamaica, Italy, U.K. - I catch the accents quite easily. In the U.S., they don't know where I am from!