Rabih Alameddine Quotes

There's something I have about being Canadian - there's a distance it gives you when you live in the States and operate in American culture. You approach familiar things a different way; you come at it from a different angle. It's a trait that runs through a lot Canadian artists' work and actors' work and musicians' - that kind of special remove.

By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.

I remember learning new words, trying to figure out what common things like cider, finding myself upset that my parents couldn't help me understand this new culture, that it was up to me to interpret for them as well as myself.

Other people's traditions look charming and decorative and exotic. They're nice places to visit on holiday, but you wouldn't want to live with one.

There's a kind of integrity to being an observer of a culture. I think Canadians have that privilege innately. We are, like, the observers of the American culture.

Even if Pearl S. Buck hadn't spent most of her life in China, she'd have every right to write about it.

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.

When I went to Australia, I had this feeling, like, 'Wow, this is really a different country.' I think that feeling of genuine foreignness, that this is a very different culture, which is increasingly rare in our globalised world.

When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role.

The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that's as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there's so many things I don't know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures - maybe even 18 or 19 of them - when I get on a subway car every day.

When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States.

I think you feel more liberated in a foreign country. You're more open. You understand less about the social constructs that exist in a certain place, so you take people more at face value, and you're also taken more at face value, which makes you more able to be yourself.

I've been exposed to so many different cultures.

I'm an immigrant, and I think being an outsider in your home is something that I really relate to.

I spent 13 years in Spain, and when you spend that amount of time somewhere, it has a deep influence on you.

Colombian culture has had a huge influence on me and taught me a different way of looking at things - I was always different from the people I went to school with, and I learned to embrace that.

I'm so used to America, used to the traffic in L.A., and I don't really feel it click with the Korean culture. But obviously, I have a Korean face, and I feel like that's just - you know, I can't walk around people like I'm, like, straight-up American. It's like, I'm Korean American. My parents are from Korea.

I always say the diversity, and culture is the one thing I love the most about the U.S. How you can travel across one borderline and you end up with this whole new set of people that I find super-interesting and great on tour.

I like to live like a local. When you are somewhere, you have to try to take the culture of that place and try to adapt.

I think it's important that the English culture changes a little bit and we do start to go abroad and step out of our comfort zone.

I was very surprised when I first started spending time in America. The culture shock was something I wasn't prepared for. I had a lot of work to do to try to begin to understand this enormous and complex country that I thought would be an easy process.

Writing in English made me become a foreigner in my own country. It helped me create the necessary distance to my homeland.

I am American. If you drop me in Seoul, I don't think I'm going to thrive there.