Chris Rea Quotes

Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.

I was black growing up in an all-white neighborhood, so I felt like I just didn't fit in. Like I wasn't as good as everybody else, or as smart, or whatever.

My second novel began after my family moved from New York City to North Carolina, and I watched my son walk into kindergarten at a school in which he was the only Jewish child out of 600 students - and this in the middle of the Bible Belt.

When I was about 11, 12, we moved to Jersey City. Everywhere I go I'm an outsider.

When I was a kid I didn't feel like I fit in because - this is really silly and I probably shouldn't say it, but, I didn't think anything was funny. So I used to go home and literally cry to my mom and my step-dad at the time and I didn't think anything was funny. I couldn't laugh.

I can't sleep the first night in a hotel room.

I was going to middle school in Berkley, and I did not fit in at all. Like a lot of kids, I found theater to be a good place for me.

It's challenging to find an identity as a young person if you don't have the sustenance of love, because you're being shipped around.

When I was little, I guess I was just an ordinary kid. But then things changed when I was in junior high. You know, kids that become geeks become one because of something. Like, they aren't good at sports, or girls don't like them. I, too, for some reason, got into things like science fiction and, well, especially science fiction as an escape.

My mom has an English accent, so we always referred to the trunk as the 'boot.' And then, suddenly, we moved to Georgia and I would say things like 'open the boot' with a bit of an accent, and I quickly realized I had to adapt; that kind of thing will get you beat up!

I remember that coming to America was scary for me because everything here is just bigger, better, shinier, you know?

To this day, I get very nervous coming back into my own country.

I knew I was different when I was about six years of age but I just knew that I wasn't like everybody else. I mean I wasn't like the other kids. I didn't know what that was. But I guess it was when I was in seventh or eighth grade, I'm like, 'Hey, something's wrong here.'

I was the kid who was too geeky for the other kids.

I was a little adult for my age as a teenager, and I didn't feel like I socially fit in with my peers.

South America was not really that open - you had to fit in, and I didn't fit in. I was different - my tastes, my point of view - were a bit weird, and I found in Britain a sense of calm, that I could just be.

Growing up in the States, there's this part of me that's like, man, I'm Indian. Like, this is where I belong. And as soon as I got to India, and I had to go to the bathroom in some places, I was, like, 'Man - I am American.'

I was one of the only people of color at my grade school and also my high school. It's weird recollecting on my childhood, I think, because my brothers are all white. We all share the same father but different mothers. I guess I kind of associated white, but I was occasionally reminded in a really negative way that I wasn't.

At 16, I was in Toronto and very shy and not hanging around with anyone who was intellectual in the slightest, so I didn't really have the means to discuss what I was seeing and feeling.

I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale.

I couldn't fit in the Irish community in New York. I was never one of the boys because they would talk about baseball or basketball, and I knew nothing about it.

I was actually a really sort of nervous, shy kid. In high school, it was one of those things where I wasn't popular or a loser; I just don't think many people really knew who I was.

When I came to America, I had some surprises at first, but I could soon adjust.

Nobody looked like me when I was growing up. None of the kids were as big as me, or as serious as me, or listened to the same music.

High school's weird, man.