V. S. Pritchett Quotes

I was never very interested in my own experience, I think, in fact, if my films have a common link, maybe it's being a foreigner - it's common for people who are born abroad - they don't know so well where they belong.

There's something I have about being Canadian - there's a distance it gives you when you live in the States and operate in American culture. You approach familiar things a different way; you come at it from a different angle. It's a trait that runs through a lot Canadian artists' work and actors' work and musicians' - that kind of special remove.

I was born abroad, but my parents were both English. Still, those few years of separation, and then coming back to England as an outsider, did give me an ability to see the country in a slightly detached way. I suppose I was made aware of what Englishness actually is because I only became immersed in it later in life.

Only when I came to America did I think of myself as British.

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.

Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.

I guess that in a lot of ways, my writing is more of a character to me than something that I feel personally attached to.

I've always felt like a foreigner wherever I've lived. I don't feel much towards my Italian or Scottish roots, although I do cook the pasta at home.

I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about.

What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S.

I was a supporting character in other people's lives, which seemed right and familiar to me. I was also an outsider: English in the U.S., American in England, dogged yet comforted by that familiar feeling of alien-ness, which occupied that space where my sense of self should have been.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners

When I went to Australia, I had this feeling, like, 'Wow, this is really a different country.' I think that feeling of genuine foreignness, that this is a very different culture, which is increasingly rare in our globalised world.

I remember going to Taiwan for the first time and... I didn't realize that everyone looked like me here and what that'd feel like.

Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.

I always felt that I wasn't as American as Americans and then I realised when I got back to the Philippines that I was not Filipino.

For the first four or five years I was in Korea, I took a lot of direction from my management and label in terms of what people want. I found myself trying to fit into that thing I never felt comfortable with because the critique I got was that I was too American, and too sophisticated and polished in terms of my musicality and it won't sell.

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

And that is something I've heard from many people who immigrate is that when they go back to their home countries, in a way, they think they're going to be embraced and completely feel like they've come home. This disconcerting thing is when you go back there and you feel more foreign than you ever have.

I've always been an outsider everywhere I go - I don't fit in with the Swedish rap community or the American rap community. But who cares?

I left Jamaica to come to England, but one place became another place. I lived in Tulse Hill, in Brixton and Coldharbour Lane.

It's only when an American steps outside of their own culture that you see how integral it is.

I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.

By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.