Genndy Tartakovsky Quotes

I can't tell you how much I love Target and Costco, that kind of culture, because it's something I never felt a part of. I've always felt like a tourist because I have never fit in anywhere.

I'll always be a foreigner.

If you're already somebody who's feeling different, you'll do everything in your power to fix it because children will do everything in their power to fit in and assimilate.

Most of us don't want to be outsiders.

Whoever imitates a people is one of them.

I will carry with me always the deep sense of what it feels like to be an outsider and how tough it was, how hard it was to adapt to this country.

I immigrated when I was six so I had to learn English and I was always an outsider from a young age, and so I think my drive was that I wanted to fit in.

Everybody is different; as long as you look like you belong and you can fit in, the world is you oyster now.

Definitely that was a big part of my childhood: wanting to fit. As an immigrant, you talk funny, you look funny, you smell funny. I wanted to do nothing but fit in and talk English and sit with everybody else.

I want to do well and I want to fit in.

Jews have had to carry around their own sense of self in a carpet bag and I think perhaps too much emphasis might be being put on nationality and on the other hand patriotism, that sort of thing.

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, the color of my skin and my rather peculiar background as an Ethiopian immigrant delineated the border of my life and friendships. I learned quickly how to stand alone.

I've always craved to belong to somewhere, but I never have and never will.

I would find myself backing away from all of the 'isms', all of the communities. I have always been able to be misused by every community But that is OK. I would rather be misused than neglected.

When I was a kid... I needed to belong.

I cried to my mother that I wanted to go to Hebrew school; I wanted Jewish friends. But when my mother took me, the kids there all knew each other, and somehow I was even more of an outcast.

I always feel like a foreigner in America.

Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian - anything but a normal, mainstream American.

Part of me always felt like the other, the outsider, the observer. My father had two sons with his second wife, who I didn't meet until my late 20s. I was always on the periphery. In Madrid, I was the only Turk in a very international school, so I had to start thinking about identity. All these things affected me.

Assimilation, not success, is the American end game.

I was very different than everybody else growing up. I spoke a different language at home, I ate different food, and I looked different. So I could always relate to Aladdin in that way, being the outcast.

I know what it's like to be ignored; when I got to L.A., I longed for somebody who looked like me to show me the ropes.

I have sort of made it my mission to be treated less as a foreigner, less as a guest.

My parents sent me to a school across town, an integrated school, where I had the chance to meet and grow up with people who were from other parts of the world. ... I remember feeling that I would never have anything to contribute on St. Patrick's Day. I couldn't tell the stories that they might have been telling about their forebears and I felt left out.

Remember that when you say "I will have non of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange," you have denied America with that word.