Mena Massoud Quotes

I was Persian-American, but I hated bringing Persian food to school. I just didn't want to stand out in that way. I wanted to be like everybody else.

I was an immigrant when I came, and one of my biggest things was I really wanted to fit in. I didn't want to be, 'Oh, look at that guy;' I wanted to be part of the crowd. Which is a weird thing, because the more successful I got, the more out of the crowd I became.

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.

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.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

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.

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

I often feel like an outsider wherever I go, so I'm always attracted to stories about identity and the meaning of home.

I feel like it has been a journey throughout the years to be accepting of my culture - I always felt different and not as accepting of it.

Algeria is what allowed me to accept myself.

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.

Sudan is not Arab enough for Arabs and not African enough for Africans.

I'll always be a foreigner.

I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.

I never felt at home in London, because people were constantly telling me I didn't belong here, so after a while, you tend to believe that.

Culture is something that we all share, and we are all the poorer for anyone excluded from it.

At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn't know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.

I think it's important to be extremely proud of one's origins, especially when you are a foreign actress with ethnic features.

I am Chinese - it doesn't matter what other people say.

As an Anglo-Indian kid in Bolton, I was basically in a minority of one. That was a source of misery, but at the same time, one of the effects of receiving the message that you don't belong to the club is that you watch the club with detachment. The fact that no one quite knew who I was was a major contributory factor in starting to write.

I don't really feel part of any particular movement.

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.

It's a project that touched me as an immigrant and as a New Yorker.