Edward Said Quotes

I grew up thinking of myself as an American but also, because of my parents and the Iranian culture that was in our home, as an Iranian. So if there's any such thing as dual loyalty, then I have it - at least culturally.

I'm bicultural, and everyone sees me as a Latina, but in my head I see myself as both Latina and American.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

Growing up in the U.S., I'd siloed off my identities. While I was an Indian at home, I was an American at school. I have now embraced both the identities.

Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.

I'm one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.

The Negro is the child of two cultures - Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures.

London scene consists of mostly foreigners. We see ourselves as British in many ways, but not English.

Even I, when I was a student in London, often wore Western clothes, and yet I'm the most Indian Indian I know.

In the end you become part of everything you hate, basically.

Maybe he was real. Maybe I'd made him up. Either way, he didn't think I needed him anymore. Maybe he was right.

I've always defined myself as a writer, I've never decided what it was I was gonna write. [...] I always fancied myself one, but I'm not. I'm so far from a writer.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.

Everyone is from Russia. Sometimes I think I'm from Russia, too. All these new Ovas. I don't know anyone. I don't really recognise anyone. That's just how it is. I think my name must be Williamsova.

There were many hours when I never quite know how I'd gotten there or why I stayed.

[Charles] Reznikoff was in between faiths, in between worlds... a double, hyphenated American. I think it probably goes deeper than that.

The beautiful thing about having grown up in Brooklyn is, because of the rich cultural and racial diversity there, no one seemed to give too much thought to where I fit on the racial spectrum. But there were times when I would run up against someone who was interested in figuring out what race was. That would come as a surprise, and in some cases, like a slap in the face.

I don't think I realized what was going to be the hardest part of becaming an artist until I dove off the diving board ... first I had to overcome a pre-speculated idea of me. I had to sort of burst through that and introduce myself, and that was the first hurdle, and then now sing in front of everybody, and then that was the second one, and I'm the offspring of - you know, who I'm the offspring of - I had a few hurdles to get through, no doubt about it. But the scales never tipped in the other direction too much.

Assimilation is really a psychological process where you come to identify with a new country as yours. The ease of overseas travel and information access interferes with that.

I'm afraid that my wife picked up a number of colorful expressions from the Yanks and such, Frank offered, with a nervous smile. True, I said, gritting my teeth as I wrapped a water-soaked napkin about my hand. Men tend to be very colorful when you're picking shrapnel out of them.

I love how New York is so multicultural. I wish I was ethnic, I'm nothing. Because if you're Hispanic and you get angry, people are like, 'He's got a Latin temper!' If you're a white guy and you get angry, people are like, 'That guy's a jerk.'

Our pride and self-importance are European, while our development and actions are Asiatic.

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.

Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish. I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one.