Marcus Samuelsson Quotes

Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.

When I went to school, I didn't know a lick of English, but it was okay because there were so many immigrants in the area, a lot of the kids didn't speak a lick of English, either. It was normal to have a wicked accent.

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

It's hard enough being American and trying to make it in an American world, but being Australian, you're from a whole different country and have a whole different way of doing things.

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

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.

I remember learning new words, trying to figure out what common things like cider, finding myself upset that my parents couldn't help me understand this new culture, that it was up to me to interpret for them as well as myself.

They say that immigrants don’t speak English. So? Who cares. Even the Irish learned English after a while.

I didn't move to Miami to live in a Spanish-speaking province.

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

Everything has changed since I came to China.

I am American. If you drop me in Seoul, I don't think I'm going to thrive there.

I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so different from American values.

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

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

When I first came to this country, I didn't know how to speak English.

It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.

I'm not a xenophobe - I think immigration is a good thing for most countries - but they transmute the foibles of their native tongues into English in a way that's difficult to figure out.

It's always overwhelming when you come to another country and you're embraced in such a positive way.

A common language is a first step towards communication across cultural boundaries.

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.

American histories were the same; they had these mad ideas about how Parliament worked, or what people really meant when they said A, B, or C. All my life, I felt simultaneously deracinated and rooted in both places, and now it's my greatest strength: I'm culturally bilingual.

As an immigrant, I learned by watching other people.

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

When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States.