Henry Golding Quotes

Growing up outside your own country makes you feel that you don't belong when you return, so you feel free to make friends with whomever you like.

I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel - till I am - nothing. As it happens, I like it that way.

I'm British - ostensibly British - but I don't know where I really belong, you know?

I've moved around so much my whole life, and I've gotten so used to being the Other in situations - the foreigner, the outsider. The first time I've ever felt like there was no separation between me and the other elements was in music.

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

Unfortunately, I think I drifted so much growing up that I don't have a strong sense of identity. I don't feel at home anywhere, and because of that, I think I'm more of a chameleon.

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.

I've spent my whole life in Chicago being asked where am I from, so that I have a sense of displacement that also is very psychologically disorienting.

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.

A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.

When I'd go to Israel, I felt like a tourist. My social and professional ties had started to dissolve, and it confused me. I didn't know whether I should stay here in Paris or go back to Israel, or even cut off all my ties with Israel so I could really plant roots here. Or maybe go somewhere else altogether.

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

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 was never very interested in my own experience, I think, in fact, if my films have a common link, maybe it's being a foreigner - it's common for people who are born abroad - they don't know so well where they belong.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

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 used to feel I was more French than anything, but I don't feel that way anymore. I really don't feel like I belong to a specific country, and it is so difficult for people to understand that.

I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I'm from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.

Every time someone asks me where I'm from, I'm not sure how to answer that question... so I say I have no roots.

I often feel like an outsider wherever I go, so I'm always attracted to stories about identity and the meaning of home.

I am realising this now more as I grow up: that I never really felt connected to locations. In some sense, I always kind of felt a little lost in that I never had any hometown pride. While I experience a lot different places and experiences, I always felt a little detached.

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 don't really feel an allegiance to any of the countries I have lived in, even though I feel like part of them, and part of them is in me.