Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje Quotes

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.

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

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

I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so different from American values.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.

I want people to experience what it's like being from Haiti, coming to America, being Wyclef - multicultural, multilingual.

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.

My identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

Everyone thinks England and America are the same, as we have the same language, but I felt like an alien as an English person living in America.

Over the course of my life, I have made many transitions - most of them taking me further away from my Somali roots and steadily toward the enlightened mentality of Western democracy.

My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself 'the American' at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.

American histories were the same; they had these mad ideas about how Parliament worked, or what people really meant when they said A, B, or C. All my life, I felt simultaneously deracinated and rooted in both places, and now it's my greatest strength: I'm culturally bilingual.

Being South Asian in the U.K. is like being Latino in the U.S., I would guess. It's a bit more hood. You see things; things happen. I was bouncing between worlds. You're acting from a very early age, when you have to code-switch like that. I'm a hybrid, a mongrel. I think many people live that life.

When I was growing up in Newcastle, there was one other Indian girl, and we got confused for each other constantly.

I have Asian friends - second generation - and I am the worst in terms of being in touch with my heritage.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

They're strange, the Aussies. Because if they like you, they say, 'Oh, he's an Aussie.' And I keep saying, 'I'm not, I'm from Preston.' There's nothing Australian about me. Don't start claiming me just because I've got a job over here.

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

There were a lot of kids from Puerto Rico at my high school in Florida; people always assumed I was Puerto Rican. Even now in California, I get talked to on the street in Spanish constantly!

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

My mum and dad were speaking all the time about, 'In Sudan we do this,' and 'In Egypt we do that,' so I was very aware of cultural differences. I was confused growing up; it gave me a feeling of being an outsider watching others. But I think this is good for a writer.

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

It's fascinating when you're from another place, but you don't speak the language.

Even though I'm very Westernized as an individual and very Canadian, I guess I've lost some of my Chinese culture.