Aman Mojadidi Quotes

My head is in India, yet my body remains in Britain. I straddle the world like a colossus. Like a 5ft. 7in. colossus.

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.

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.

I grew up very American but also fully Asian.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

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

I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.

I always think like I was born in the country where everybody ate apples. Then I ended up in the country where everybody eats bananas. So now, I eat bananas so long, I'm just remembering the apples.

People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects.

Thematically, in a lot of what I write, there's a sense of displacement, of being rooted in multiple places, and how that can tug at your identities and your wants and your goals.

I would go to school and be American and then come home and be Greek.

I feel partly American, but I have an ambiguous relation with both America and India, the only two countries I really know. I never feel fully one way or the other.

I often say to my friends that I felt too Puerto Rican to live in the States; then I felt too American to live in Puerto Rico. So when I settled back in Puerto Rico in 1992, I had to come to terms with all of that.

I had quite a scattered childhood. I was Irish in London, because I had my secondary school education there. I never really fitted anywhere. I didn't feel it was a negative thing, and I was never made to feel different - I just knew I was.

I was raised in Brussels as a Belgian but, at the same time, feeling that I wasn't necessarily from here.

I pride myself on being Japanese American.

I'm not more Brazilian than I am American or vice-versa - I'm very much a combination of all of those things.

I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It's part of who I am as well.

I always felt I wasn't completely American and I wasn't completely British: there was a feeling of having my feet in both places.

I sort of consider myself a Nigerian who spends a lot of time in the U.S.

I'm a third-culture child. It's an interesting concept. Having an American father, a South American mother, born in England, grew up in Hong Kong, went to school in Europe - it makes me a third-culture child, which means you take on the culture of the place where you live. So I'm very adaptable.

I'm born and raised in Mexico. I only spent eight months in the States, but definitely English is a really big part of my life, and I love it. Thank God my mom put me in American school because I'm able to be working in the States, and it opens a lot more doors being half and not being only one. It's cool because I get to turn it on and off.

My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.

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.

Being American and being an outsider at the same time, it's a perspective I often bring to a character.