Peter Doig Quotes

I'm stuck somewhere a small island in the middle of the Atlantic where I'm alone. Because in France, they're like, 'No, you're not like us, you're not a French guy.' And in America, they're like, 'You're not like us.' I'm really alone in my little thing.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.

When you come back to a country that you've left, you're in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don't belong to that country any more, even though when I'm in America I feel I don't belong there either.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

Exile is not a time frame. Exile is an experience. It's a sentiment.

I have to live within my memories, within my private universe, and continually return to China, the land where my thoughts are locked. This is a very painful kind of existence, this feeling of nowhereness.

I never belonged anywhere. I just felt like a creature from another planet.

I've always been an outsider; a displaced person.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

I belong nowhere and to no one.

I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.

I always feel like a foreigner in America.

In South Africa, I feel I am a stranger, at best an animal.

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 don't really feel like I belong anywhere.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

I'll always be a foreigner.

Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal.

In a sense, I feel a lot more an outsider in Los Angeles than I did in Newfoundland.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.

I've always craved to belong to somewhere, but I never have and never will.