Susanna Clarke Quotes

If a foreign country doesn't look like a middle-class suburb of Dallas or Detroit, then obviously the natives must be dangerous as well as badly dressed.

I don't really have anything against the French except that, as an American, I've been bred to despise them with the same zeal as soccer and Renny Harlin films.

I also love Disney, and will defend doing so, because there's so much in those films and I don't care if it's stereotyped.

Because I had an accent, people had this impression that I was dumb.

I have been a victim of stereotypes. I come from Latin America and to some countries, we are considered 'losers,' drug traffickers, and that is not fair because that is generalizing.

Most visions of extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional extraterrestrials of 'Star Trek' or a hundred other space operas are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men.

We have to allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, including cultural mistakes, in our first drafts. I believe it's okay to get cultural details wrong in your first draft. It's okay if stereotypes emerge. It just means that your experience is limited, that you're human.

Yeah, I'm sure there are stereotypes of Asian people.

There are cultural issues everywhere - in Bangladesh, Latin America, Africa, wherever you go. But somehow when we talk about cultural differences, we magnify those differences.

Americans who have travelled and who have English friends know we are not necessarily all baddies, but I think that seeing us being so incessantly nasty on screen has a drip, drip, drip effect on the rest of them.

Liberals are about to become the last people to figure out that Arabs lie.

Latins are macho, they hate gringos and they hate gringos’ wives. What else do you want to know?

American prejudices about Europe rarely surface in headlines, but they are real, pervasive, and ingrained.

I navigate different cultures daily, and I understand how people can make false assumptions because of their lack of interaction with the cultures I find myself in. But if they don't frequent these spaces much, how can they rush to judgment?

I like wee arguments, I've never been into jokes. I'm more into strange things and madness and things escalating and things not really making sense.

I guess I can be stereotypical and say that Asians are very cheap.

The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that from early infancy the mind of the child is provided with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc.

Infinite are the arguments of mages.

I'm not much interested in travelling scholarships for women - or in fact in scholarships, tout court! - they'd much better stay at home and mind the baby. Still less am I interested in scholarships for female Yids.

Consider it this way: what would you say if a blond homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. Now I believe you should consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it's an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner–ah!–you find it beautiful.

When in doubt about who's to blame. Blame the English.

When an English man speaks well, for example now, and this is another way of putting us down, they say he's "eloquent" you see. "Oh, eloquent chap they are!" An Irish person speak well, they say, "Ah, you have the gift of the gab." "Ah, you kissed the blarney stone." You see, all of this putting us down.

On my fortieth birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis I decided it might be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself to be a magician.

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.

Switzerland is a curst, selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world.