Eric Ripert Quotes

To pretend you don't feel a certain strangeness after living in England for 40 years is a fallacy.

When I came to America in 1978, I was a huge sports fan - the problem was, my sport was cricket. Shockingly enough, no one wanted to talk cricket with me!

I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores - its anti-Semitism for example.

It's been a bit of a struggle getting used to life in the States, adapting to a new lifestyle.

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

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

When I first came to this country I was this new kid from the Caribbean. England was a rude awakening for me.

Moving to France is not the hard part. Living here is more difficult. Of course there are many benefits but it's not always easy especially if you don't speak the language.

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.

As a European I had fit in almost seamlessly in New York for the last 25 years, but in Oklahoma I stood out like a sore thumb.

The first 10 years of my life, I lived as 'Matangi.' When I came to England in '86, my first week of school was terrible because I would put my hand up to answer things, and no one would choose me because they couldn't say my name. My auntie came from Europe to visit us, and she was like, 'Just call yourself something else.'

I was six when we came to this country. When I was 14 or so, I still had a lot of trouble with it.

I couldn't settle in Italy - it was like living in a foreign country.

The Hispanic population in this country is not a monolith. When you're in Miami, the newscast is going to be different from the newscast in Los Angeles.

As a child, I grew up the son of German immigrant parents, so I grew up being teased and called 'Fritz' at school. When I married my wife and went to live in Vienna, I was teased for being a Brit.

I was 13 when my parents moved to Israel, and I was put in a Scottish mission school. Ninety-nine percent of the children were Israeli... Suddenly, I found myself speaking the wrong language, dressed in the wrong clothes, picked up by the wrong mode of transportation - an embassy car instead of a bus.

Everyone thinks England and America are the same, as we have the same language, but I felt like an alien as an English person living in America.

Of course, everyone knows my story of being born in Russia and moving to the United States at 7. For a few years people would say, 'Well, she's living in the United States, but she's Russian.'

I always heard that immigrants had a really hard life when they came to America.

My family is Chilean, and I was born there. By the time I was four, we were living in San Antonio, Texas, and I just remember picking a blue bonnet and getting yelled at by some guy with a sheriff hat and a badge. I was traumatized. He told me it was the state flower, and I wasn't supposed to be messin' with it.

I want to deal with somebody who comes from another country to the United States and has a family that comes. I don't care if it's a black family from Jamaica or a Hispanic family from Mexico. These issues need to be dealt with, but they need to be dealt with in the entertaining way.

When you're not born in this country, you kind of study how people talk and how they act, and you try and break things down.

My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself 'the American' at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.

I thought everything would be different in America. It wasn't.