Sherman Alexie Quotes

My parents left Iran in 1979 and moved to France and then moved to the U.S. My brother was born in France and I was born in New York. I think my parents left France because they felt their kids would never be accepted by French culture. Here they thought we could feel American - that we could feel safe in that way - which was important to them, given what their experiences were in Iran. They used to joke about how I could be president because I was the only one born in America.

Well, when you're an immigrant writer, or an immigrant, you're not always welcome to this country unless you're the right immigrant. If you have a Mexican accent, people look at you like, you know, where do you come from and why don't you go back to where you came from? So, even though I was born in the United States, I never felt at home in the United States. I never felt at home until I moved to the Southwest, where, you know, there's a mix of my culture with the U.S. culture, and that was why I lived in Texas for 25 years.

Once you are an immigrant, you never forget that you are one.

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

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

I've been such a gypsy in my life because I was born in northern England and grew up there until I was 16. But I'm 31 now, so I've lived almost half my life in so many other countries that I don't really know what nationality I am. I mean, I've got a British passport and an American green card, but I don't know where I'm from anymore.

You can live in the same city your entire life and still be completely a foreigner when you step out, in your old age, onto the street.

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.

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'll always be a foreigner.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

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

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.

In Geneva, I was seen as an outsider. In the U.S., I was considered Eurotrash. And in London, I'm seen as an American.

I saw an opportunity to use a restaurant to identify a lot of my issues and concerns with being an immigrant in America, and Asian in America, and a young person in America.

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.

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

I was born in India - but never really lived there.

Once a refugee, always a refugee. I can't ever remember not being all right wherever I was, but you don't give your whole allegiance to a place or want to be entirely identified with the society you're living in.

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.

I think of myself as an Indian comedian, but I've had British and American schooling. I always had this feeling of not fitting in anywhere, of observing situations from the outside.

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.

Thematically, in a lot of what I write, there's a sense of displacement, of being rooted in multiple places, and how that can tug at your identities and your wants and your goals.

Countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands may pay lip service to inclusion, but the ethos in those places is that immigrants can never really become French, Italian or Dutch, no matter what their passports say. The emphasis is on tolerance and respect, but there’s no real expectation that foreign nationals fit in.

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.