Jim Broadbent Quotes

Americans are hidden dragons to me.

China was the first time I truly felt like an outsider. I fell in love with the process of trying to become intimate with the culture.

I never felt particularly alienated as an English person in America. It doesn't feel culturally like a massive gap to me.

My mother came from Japan, and I really didn't understand her often. Now that I'm older, I do.

I love playing in America. I feel having been there a few times that I "get" America a lot more than I used to. It used to be so strange to me. It takes years to learn how to separate the actual, major, important differences from the superficial differences that aren't essential or crucial.

You experience other cultures to give you a kind of shock that makes you look at your own culture. You appreciate it more as a result of being out of it, but you also realise there are some things lacking in your culture.

At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn't know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.

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.

I'd always felt like a Canadian living in the U.S.

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.

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

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Every time a director calls me and says, 'If you practice a lot in two months, can you be an American?' And I always tell them, 'Well, maybe but I'm French. So it's going to be hard to be someone else.'

I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about.

It was nice to be in my own country, where I didn't need a translator or a driver. Where I didn't need to figure out cultural references or what hijab I needed to wear to cover my hair.

I guess anime helped me understand the Japanese culture a little better and makes me want to honor certain language nuances that don't always translate to English.

I speak pretty fluent American, though I do so with a strong British accent, and I love America: The scale and the variety of it are astonishing to someone not born there, and I'm convinced that its energy and generosity have somehow rubbed off on me and affected my writing. For the better.

The people I mixed with in Monaco didn't relate to my South African mentality or humor... Although I have met some wonderful people since I've been living in Monaco, I regard them all as acquaintances. I only have two people I consider friends here.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of things American - but when American people do British stuff, it's so universally dreadful.

My wife is French, and so I get to see America through her eyes, which informs a lot of little moments. It means I can poke fun at very particular things about us.

I'm in fact Australian but my mother's English so I've got no problem playing a domineering English woman.

Weirdly, when I'm playing an English person, I feel like I've got nothing to hang on to, and it feels a bit strange and exposing.

Americans are as they are. We have to accept this. Lots of Europeans forget that.

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 a company of contradictions. Nothing is what it appears to be. We have to be extremely respectful when we go overseas.