Aravind Adiga Quotes

I certainly know German colleagues in the U.S. who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. But I've never tried that.

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

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture.

My whole family has been having trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country.

I'm French - it's less important. Meaning, I remain a Frenchman in America, but I adapt to American culture. I feel good there - but I'm still a foreigner.

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

As a young boy in a new country, you had to make new friends, and that was really difficult.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

It was such a culture shock for me, being plucked from this diverse neighborhood in London into Jamaica Queens. I'm in this new environment, and I had an English accent.

To be a foreigner may be an advantage but disadvantage as well. It was advantage for me for sure.

I'm excited to share my experience as an immigrant assimilating to a new country and an outsider stumbling my way into Hollywood.

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.

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.

We go to Europe to be Americanized.

I know my own deficiencies, one of which is that I had lived away from America for such a long time. It's called expatriate.

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

The first 10 years of my life, I lived as 'Matangi.' When I came to England in '86, my first week of school was terrible because I would put my hand up to answer things, and no one would choose me because they couldn't say my name. My auntie came from Europe to visit us, and she was like, 'Just call yourself something else.'

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

In this case it appealed to me partly because it felt close to me in some ways. This is about a confused, bewildered middle class Englishman adrift in smalltown America and that has definitely been me.

When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.

I know a lot of Americans in Paris who have married Frenchmen. They keep bringing up their experience, the clash of civilizations, the clash of personalities.

This happens to a lot of kids from different backgrounds - they lose a lot of their parents' and grandparents' teachings, language and culture because they have to deal with another language and culture 24/7. By the time I was 44, I was terrible at Spanish. I was always intimidated whenever I had to speak it.

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

When I go home to England, my friends all make fun of me for sounding American.