Salman Rushdie Quotes

As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.

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 grew up thinking of myself as an American but also, because of my parents and the Iranian culture that was in our home, as an Iranian. So if there's any such thing as dual loyalty, then I have it - at least culturally.

As I stand here today and tell you about these, I am heavy with an awareness of the fact that I am in more than one sense a product of both the Chinese and Western cultures, in harmony and in conflict.

It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.

I'm bicultural, and everyone sees me as a Latina, but in my head I see myself as both Latina and American.

If you take my own life, the longer you stay in a country, you almost lose your former self and become this third-party person who is caught in between two worlds.

I grew up in a Mauritian bubble in France... I had the feeling of not belonging, but still living with French culture.

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

I grew up in the States, but I go back to Brazil quite often, and a big part of me is very Brazilian, so there's a constant struggle between the two cultures within me. They're very different approaches to life.

When you come from an immigrant home, you're in a whole different world until you leave your house. In my teenage years, I had to learn to switch cultures the second I left my house and, when I came back, to go back to my fundamentals.

I think that a lot of the stories I would see was kids who are first-generation immigrants, watching them try to rip themselves from their family and their faith and kind of erase. I hadn't really seen anything where someone's trying to reconcile the two.

I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.

Growing up in the U.S., I'd siloed off my identities. While I was an Indian at home, I was an American at school. I have now embraced both the identities.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

Westernized Indians don't like my books and I tend not to like westernized Indians - so we're quits.

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

I'm Franco-Swiss. I've always been shuttling between these two worlds, never firmly planted in either one.

A bicultural upbringing is a rich but imperfect thing

Sudan is not Arab enough for Arabs and not African enough for Africans.

I realized how Latina I was, and then also, at the same time, how not Latina enough I was, because I'm born and raised in Los Angeles. I speak Spanish, but I don't speak perfect Spanish, not like a native speaker.

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

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

I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.