Juan Goytisolo Quotes

I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored.

I was one of the only people of color at my grade school and also my high school. It's weird recollecting on my childhood, I think, because my brothers are all white. We all share the same father but different mothers. I guess I kind of associated white, but I was occasionally reminded in a really negative way that I wasn't.

The forces of globalization and religious marginalization are out to get us.

I'm from an upper-middle class background. But because there was no one of my race where I grew up, I was very isolated. I felt different from everybody else.

I was bad at sports and picked last every day. I couldn't quite figure out what my role was in the social order, so I decided I was interested in comedy. And what was then interesting was, nobody else was interested in it at all. I didn't find one friend who was interested in comedy until I moved to California and met other comedians. And suddenly I knew hundreds of people who knew as much about SCTV as I did. But it took me 20 years to find those people.

With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

I know that some people, when they are growing up and they - as a person of color in a majority community - that they may feel as if they are left out, or they feel a bit strange.

I was a very repressed young person. I wasn't good at school. I didn't fit in.

I couldn't fit in the Irish community in New York. I was never one of the boys because they would talk about baseball or basketball, and I knew nothing about it.

I never quite fit in - at least, from my own perspective, you know.

I've never really fit in.

In 19 years growing up in Israel I had no Jewish friends. Zero.

I have experienced things that I think many Canadians have gone through - the feeling of not belonging, the feeling of being a victim, of being hurt, being marginalized.

Being attracted to my own sex was as much part of who I was as being short or blonde or drawn to the library, but I was made to grow up feeling 'other.' Most books, films - even advertisements - didn't reflect how I felt, and I often watched the world from the outside.

I remember my first day at grammar school, being the only person who was me. Everybody else was like everybody else, and there I was, tanned, in a freezing cold playground in the middle of Middlesbrough, wondering what on earth I was doing there.

When I was growing up, I always felt a bit like I didn't quite fit in, a feeling that perhaps still lingers in the background to this very day. I was the small brown girl in the big white suburb.

Dating in the closet is torture. It's one of the most difficult things, especially if you are completely closeted.

Many said I am not a Baloch and I have nothing to do with the community; in general, the feeling is that I am doing everything to bring shame to Pakistan. But I will not stop.

I tried to find a social niche at Harvard - a group, my group - but I was unsuccessful.

I think that being in the closet is really hard. It takes a toll on your mind. It takes a toll on you. I think it just makes every aspect of your life more difficult.

My second novel began after my family moved from New York City to North Carolina, and I watched my son walk into kindergarten at a school in which he was the only Jewish child out of 600 students - and this in the middle of the Bible Belt.

I never felt comfortable in my own skin, and I feel like I missed out on a lot of high school experiences because I was so worried about where I fit in because I was so confused.

My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.

For immigrant families, television is what connects you to American culture, but it's also what makes you feel like an outsider.

I was a Vietnamese kid with a mullet hair cut. I had all Westie mates, and, geez, a Vietnamese guy with a mullet doesn't work; no wonder I couldn't get a girlfriend for so many years.