Anthony Bourdain Quotes

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

What's the point of being an Australian guy traveling through India if you are going to go to India to meet other Australians?

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.

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners

I find it really liberating to be in a place where I am a foreigner in every way. I've lived with this all my life - this divide, this bifurcation. And in Italy, I don't feel it. There's none of that tension, only the expectation I place on myself to speak the language well. I find it relaxing. Something drops away, and I observe.

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.

When in Rome, I must do as the Romans do. When in America, make Bikram copyright and trademark.

In college, I was a researcher/writer for 'Let's Go: Europe,' assigned to Crete and Cyprus. I was supposed to go to England, but at the last minute they transferred me, despite the fact that I spoke not a word of Greek. I learned the very basics, and to this day can say 'oil,' 'vinegar,' and 'boyfriend in America.'

Americans are people who prefer the Continent to their own country, but refuse to learn its languages.

It was nice to be in my own country, where I didn't need a translator or a driver. Where I didn't need to figure out cultural references or what hijab I needed to wear to cover my hair.

There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences.

Seriously, some Americans just shouldn't leave the country.

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.

China was the first time I truly felt like an outsider. I fell in love with the process of trying to become intimate with the culture.

In some ways England is more liberal than France, but I also find it more intrusive. But when you go abroad you have to accept the ways of where you live. I have to respect that.

The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that's as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there's so many things I don't know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures - maybe even 18 or 19 of them - when I get on a subway car every day.

Other people's traditions look charming and decorative and exotic. They're nice places to visit on holiday, but you wouldn't want to live with one.

No matter how certain I am about some culture or some group of people, my opinions are only as accurate as the amount of time I've spent with them.

What I want to tell people is that you can mix the culture a little bit and it's not always appropriation.

There's a kind of integrity to being an observer of a culture. I think Canadians have that privilege innately. We are, like, the observers of the American culture.

When I go to Korea and they say, 'Sing like a Korean person,' I can't do it. I didn't grow up with that sound.

Even if Pearl S. Buck hadn't spent most of her life in China, she'd have every right to write about it.

I always say the diversity, and culture is the one thing I love the most about the U.S. How you can travel across one borderline and you end up with this whole new set of people that I find super-interesting and great on tour.

I understand different cultures because I have travelled a lot.

There was never a book, a magazine, a movie, a television show that spoke to my experience as a bicultural teen. I could find a million articles on finding the perfect prom dress or getting the guy of your dreams, but how about 'Ten Sure Fire Steps to Being the Perfect Korean Daughter and Not Be a Freak at Your High School?'