Richard Wagner Quotes

When you are in a band for a number of years you loose your identity in a way. You become a part of that band and then all of a sudden you are not part of that band. You are still the band without the other two members.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

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.

I don't feel alienated from American culture, but I understand people who do.

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 never fit in. Everyone knew my dad was Indian. I was half-Indian.

Russians call me German, Germans call me Russian, Jews call me a Christian, Christians a Jew.

I am a New Zealander, but I don't want to swallow New Zealand identity in one gulp.

But I don't think of myself as a foreigner or a Frenchman! I just think of myself as a director.

I'm a product of Russian culture, but I never felt it was my country.

I grew up on the north side of Chicago, in West Rogers Park, an overwhelmingly Jewish neighborhood. When I was 13, my parents moved to Winnetka, Illinois, an upper class, WASPy suburb where Jews - as well as Blacks and Catholics - were unwelcome on many blocks. I suffered the spiritual equivalent of whiplash.

Countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands may pay lip service to inclusion, but the ethos in those places is that immigrants can never really become French, Italian or Dutch, no matter what their passports say. The emphasis is on tolerance and respect, but there’s no real expectation that foreign nationals fit in.

If I don't measure up as an American writer, at least leave me to my delusion.

I was the black atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns.

I'm Scottish, but I also feel British at that same time.

I think the Aussieness got beaten out of me back in the States.

When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

I always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody.

Cultural relativism has made it so people don't know who they are anymore.

If we deny our culture and become nothing and everything, that weakens us.

When a country loses its identity, it no longer knows what it is or where it comes from and what its real worth is. So it dissolves.

It's funny because when you're a Welshman living in England, you always get the mickey taken out of you for being Welsh, and then when you go to Wales with an English accent because you were born in Bristol and grew up in Birmingham, they say you're English. You can never win.

When I come to the airport, they always send me with all the other Israeli Arabs to the foreign workers' line. I don't mind. I feel like I belong more with all the people from abroad and the foreign workers than in the Israelis' line.

'Authentic' is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?

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