Juan Goytisolo Quotes

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

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

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'm stuck somewhere a small island in the middle of the Atlantic where I'm alone. Because in France, they're like, 'No, you're not like us, you're not a French guy.' And in America, they're like, 'You're not like us.' I'm really alone in my little thing.

Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.

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

In South Africa, I feel I am a stranger, at best an animal.

In Mumbai, I feel like a stranger.

We moved around a lot when I was younger. I never really felt at home until we moved to Canada, but even then, I always felt strangely out of place and alien.

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.

I have to live within my memories, within my private universe, and continually return to China, the land where my thoughts are locked. This is a very painful kind of existence, this feeling of nowhereness.

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

I've always been an outsider; a displaced person.

I belong nowhere and to no one.

I came to Washington where I knew I would be farther away from America than I could be on some foreign shore.

I always feel like a foreigner in America.

I never felt truly at home in Switzerland.

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

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

I'm a little bit older, I've traveled the world, spent lots of time in New York and Paris and lots of inspiring places, and I still feel alien.

And I, as I lived, in an alien landWill die a slave and an orphan.

I'm the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don't really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.

I have been a stranger in a foreign land.

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.

I'll always be a foreigner.