Allegra Huston Quotes

When I'm in Brazil, I'm not Brazilian at all; I am a gringo. And then when I'm in England, I'm not really English, but when I lived in Canada, I was considered too English. So I never really felt like I clicked somewhere or that I belonged to one place.

I was raised in Brussels as a Belgian but, at the same time, feeling that I wasn't necessarily from here.

I always felt that I wasn't as American as Americans and then I realised when I got back to the Philippines that I was not Filipino.

I was a westerner in Iran, an Iranian in the West. I had no identity. I didn't even know anymore why I was living.

I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.

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.

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.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

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.

I often say to my friends that I felt too Puerto Rican to live in the States; then I felt too American to live in Puerto Rico. So when I settled back in Puerto Rico in 1992, I had to come to terms with all of that.

Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.

I've spent my whole life in Chicago being asked where am I from, so that I have a sense of displacement that also is very psychologically disorienting.

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

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.

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.

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'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.

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

I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel - till I am - nothing. As it happens, I like it that way.

I was never very interested in my own experience, I think, in fact, if my films have a common link, maybe it's being a foreigner - it's common for people who are born abroad - they don't know so well where they belong.

I'm British - ostensibly British - but I don't know where I really belong, you know?

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

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.