David Henry Hwang Quotes

The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language.

When I go home to England, my friends all make fun of me for sounding American.

I don't really have that much contact with Americans. I mean, I see the oddest things on the Internet, I suppose. And I've got a couple of American friends, but they are Anglophiles anyway because they've decided to come live here.

China is just so different from the rest of the world.

In Italy, you're in your comfort zone when it comes to language, lifestyle, your habits and preparations, and moving abroad is not easy. It's not easy to carry over your own ideas about football, your own methods. You have to get everything across in a different language, and that wastes a lot of energy.

To be a foreigner may be an advantage but disadvantage as well. It was advantage for me for sure.

It's hard enough being American and trying to make it in an American world, but being Australian, you're from a whole different country and have a whole different way of doing things.

I arrived in the U.S.A. in 1935, to San Francisco. I got the boat from China, and I didn't even speak English. I could read a little, perhaps write a little, but that was all. It was a 17-day journey, and I learnt to speak English from the stewards.

I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so different from American values.

Culture clash is terrific drama.

When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

Compared with U.S. cities, Japanese cities bend over backward to help foreigners. The countryside is another matter.

I never found it frustrating not speaking.

It's fascinating when you're from another place, but you don't speak the language.

Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.

I don't know if my sense of humor goes over Americans' heads.

When I came to England, the first director I met was Charles Sturridge, who told me, 'You speak like somebody out of the 1950s.'

My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it.

I know a lot of Americans in Paris who have married Frenchmen. They keep bringing up their experience, the clash of civilizations, the clash of personalities.

The only problem was that I couldn't communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don't. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language.

Always when you go to a new country and they teach you bad words, you just say them without knowing the value and people look at you because you didn't know that value of them.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

I decided that Europeans and Americans are like men and women: they understand each other worse, and it matters less, than either of them suppose.

I look at myself, and I see a Spanish person who's trying to be understood by an English-speaking audience and is putting a lot of energy into that, instead of into expressing himself freely and feeling comfortable.