Pico Iyer Quotes

I had quite a scattered childhood. I was Irish in London, because I had my secondary school education there. I never really fitted anywhere. I didn't feel it was a negative thing, and I was never made to feel different - I just knew I was.

My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent. People assumed I was Egyptian.

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 probably felt most out of place as a young kid growing up in Sri Lanka. My mental world was somewhere else, partly because of reading and daydreaming.

I do not feel an exile from America in any sense.

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

I never really felt like I belonged in California.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

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.

Everyone is from Russia. Sometimes I think I'm from Russia, too. All these new Ovas. I don't know anyone. I don't really recognise anyone. That's just how it is. I think my name must be Williamsova.

I think one can live in American society with a certain cultural heritage, whether it's an African heritage or other, European,what have you, and still absorb a great deal of this culture. There is always cultural assimilation.

When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was fit in, but if you're perpetually an outsider, it gives you a perspective that might have a little more objectivity than people who really feel connected to their social environment in which they grow up.

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 think people look at me and realize that I am definitely not in line to the throne. It feels very easy living in Great Britain. The world is a much smaller place than it used to be, it doesn't feel like a huge cultural difference living here.

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.

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.

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

L.A. really doesn't feel like home to me anymore.

I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about.

Growing up outside your own country makes you feel that you don't belong when you return, so you feel free to make friends with whomever you like.

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

Maybe to feel like an Afghan I needed to be born and raised in the States, and maybe I needed to live in Afghanistan for nearly a decade to feel like an American. Both worlds shaped me, but neither one of them completely correspond to the picture I have of myself.

I've now been in this country for thirteen years, since I was seventeen. So this is my second home.