John Guare Quotes

Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.

In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home: a notion that something - our point of origin, our roots, the home country - is out there.

Is where you're from the place you're leaving or where you have roots?

I was born in Brooklyn, but I never lived there.

Brazil is where I have to be, where I have my roots.

It's really important to go back to where you come from.

You can take the guy out of the neighorhood but you can't take the neighborhood out of the guy.

My roots are still in Britain, that's where I live, that's the place where I come from.

Being Irish means you belong to the clan. It's what you feel. They feel Irish.

The question about my Canadianness comes up a lot, and I'm never quite sure what to say about it. I've carved a life out for myself in Oregon, and it feels like home, not because it's the States but because that's where my friends are and where my son is.

I didn't choose to come to the United States, but being raised here has shaped exactly who I am today, and I can't imagine that being taken away from me.

I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong.

No matter where I go or what title I may achieve, I will always be the son of exiles.

It's really hard to escape where you were brought up. Not that I would ever want to escape it.

I'm always in touch with where I'm from.

The best thing you can do is remember your home town.

What any immigrant is after is a taste of home.

My whole identity comes from Pakistan.

In the poetry of immigrants, nostalgia is as common as confetti at parades or platitudes at political conventions.

On the flight over to the Gulf of Mexico, I wondered about how they say you can never go home again, but maybe an equally expensive reality is how many people, regardless of how many years or miles they put between themselves and where they were born, are never truly able to leave home.

I could have had Spanish nationality, and I didn't take it.

Today, I'm Brazilian, born in Rio de Janeiro, but my second home is Paris. Nobody can change that.

I consider myself a brown American or a man of color before I would say Sri Lankan, to be honest. I didn't grow up there. There was a pretty brutal civil war there from 1983 until 2009. So we weren't able to go back very much. I've gone back as an adult. But I grew up in Pennsylvania.

An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.

I was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland and it is still home to me. My writing has taken me all over the world, but this is the place I come back to and the place where I find it easiest to write.