Andrew Niccol Quotes

I don't really identify with America, I don't really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don't really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don't. All the definitions are there, but I don't really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

I often say to my friends that I felt too Puerto Rican to live in the States; then I felt too American to live in Puerto Rico. So when I settled back in Puerto Rico in 1992, I had to come to terms with all of that.

I always felt that I wasn't as American as Americans and then I realised when I got back to the Philippines that I was not Filipino.

I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.

I don't feel I was "born American," but my homeland was denied to me after the end of World War II and I craved something I could identify with.

People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.

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.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

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.

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.

When you come back to a country that you've left, you're in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don't belong to that country any more, even though when I'm in America I feel I don't belong there either.

America as a setting seems inexhaustibly fascinating to me, and I think there's something about the outsider viewpoint that works for me. Being of Jewish descent in England always carried a vague sense of being foreign, while not being a practicing Jew made it hard to think of myself as fully Jewish either. So living here in a way just clarifies that terminal outsider position - makes it somehow official, which I like.

I feel no bond with South Africa, which is curious, since South Africa is where I was born.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S.

I'm British - ostensibly British - but I don't know where I really belong, you know?

I've moved around so much my whole life, and I've gotten so used to being the Other in situations - the foreigner, the outsider. The first time I've ever felt like there was no separation between me and the other elements was in music.

When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.

Being an expatriate doesn't go down well in America.

I don't really feel like I belong anywhere.

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

They're strange, the Aussies. Because if they like you, they say, 'Oh, he's an Aussie.' And I keep saying, 'I'm not, I'm from Preston.' There's nothing Australian about me. Don't start claiming me just because I've got a job over here.

Unfortunately, I think I drifted so much growing up that I don't have a strong sense of identity. I don't feel at home anywhere, and because of that, I think I'm more of a chameleon.