Olivier Martinez Quotes

During my childhood in Cyprus, the British talked about the Cypriots as if the Cypriots were outsiders in their own country. And even though I was born in Cyprus, my parents were American, and so I was an outsider in the land of my birth.

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.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

In general, I have felt more at home in the U.S. than I ever felt in England.

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.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

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.

Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal.

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

My father is from Newark in Nottinghamshire and my mother is from the very north of Ireland. They've ended up in Scotland, where my father - well, both of them - will always be seen as having come from somewhere else.

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.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

America is a land in which a man forgets his native country.

I always feel like a foreigner in America.

I've basically grown up in America. Even if Iran were to change, I wouldn't see myself moving there. That feeling exists for my mother and people of her generation. They say, 'Hopefully, one day.'

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

People say to me all the time, 'When did you know that you had fully become an American?' And I say, 'The day I realized I loved peanut butter.'

I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me.

They've lived here now for more than half of their lives, and they raised a family here and now have grandchildren here... It has become their home, but at the same time, for my parents, I don't think either of them will ever consciously think, 'I am an American.'

Ever since I was little, when I moved to Canada, Canada has been my home.

I love being a foreigner.

I left Cameroon when I was 13 years old, and I've lived more in Europe than Africa.

I refused to learn English for two years when we moved to London, hoping to send my family back home. It was tough, but at the same time, it has given me a sense of displacement that actually really suits the life that I'm living now.