Rory Stewart Quotes

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

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

I never did very well as an immigrant. I've lived in several countries and been a disaster everywhere.

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

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.

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 certainly know German colleagues in the U.S. who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. But I've never tried that.

What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S.

Yeah, my dad was in the foreign service. We lived in India, Indonesia and Africa, and we traveled a lot from those places. I was 10 when we moved back, and I felt like the odd guy out. It wasn't until later that I appreciated it. But coming back I didn't know any TV shows or music, which was even worse.

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.

If you take my own life, the longer you stay in a country, you almost lose your former self and become this third-party person who is caught in between two worlds.

In China, I realized that if you visit often enough and learn the language, you will be assimilated, but you'll still be kept at arm's length; you'll always be looked on as a foreigner.

I'm French - it's less important. Meaning, I remain a Frenchman in America, but I adapt to American culture. I feel good there - but I'm still a foreigner.

I have written about cultural dislocation, and I understand the corrosive effect of diminished expectations.

I couldn't fit in the Irish community in New York. I was never one of the boys because they would talk about baseball or basketball, and I knew nothing about it.

Being an expatriate doesn't go down well in America.

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

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.

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

For immigrant families, television is what connects you to American culture, but it's also what makes you feel like an outsider.

Writing in English made me become a foreigner in my own country. It helped me create the necessary distance to my homeland.

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

I came from another county. I spent 15 years in Wells, but I was treated like an outsider. It was like, "Oh, you're not local."

Shopping as lifestyle is really a sub-cultural problem. When the strictures that set you apart or oppressed you, disappear, is there a way, legitimately, to maintain your sense of specialness and difference? And how do you express that? Does it just become a kind of kitsch? You can say this of gay people, but it's true for Jewish people, Italian Americans, everyone who deals with it. It's a question of assimilation. How can you be assimilated and special at the same time?

The strange thing about my life is that I came to America at about the time when racial attitudes were changing. This was a big help to me. Also, the people who were most cruel to me when I first came to America were black Americans. They made absolute fun of the way I talked, the way I dressed. I couldn't dance. The people who were most kind and loving to me were white people. So what can one make of that? Perhaps it was a coincidence that all the people who found me strange were black and all the people who didn't were white.