Gurinder Chadha Quotes

Everybody in Spain is sick of me. But in America, there's curiosity about the new kid on the block who doesn't speak English very well. The attention makes me feel vulnerable, which is something I hadn't felt in a while. But I like it.

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've gotten used to being a foreigner.

I am American. If you drop me in Seoul, I don't think I'm going to thrive there.

I was 13 when my parents moved to Israel, and I was put in a Scottish mission school. Ninety-nine percent of the children were Israeli... Suddenly, I found myself speaking the wrong language, dressed in the wrong clothes, picked up by the wrong mode of transportation - an embassy car instead of a bus.

I consider myself Russian-American because I'm American by ethnicity and by passport, but I spent all my forming years over in the former Soviet Union in a Russian school. I never went to an American school. There was a lot of culture shock when I moved back to the States when I was 17.

I refused to learn English for two years when we moved to London, hoping to send my family back home. It was tough, but at the same time, it has given me a sense of displacement that actually really suits the life that I'm living now.

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

When I first came to this country I was this new kid from the Caribbean. England was a rude awakening for me.

I was just stunned when I came to America. I didn't know anything about rock music or football, and I felt very out of it... America was like a foreign country to me at first.

When I first came USA, I didn't feel this was my home. This was where I was studying, and then my home was now rejecting me.

As a European I had fit in almost seamlessly in New York for the last 25 years, but in Oklahoma I stood out like a sore thumb.

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

We breathed the air of freedom without knowing the language or any person.

Everyone thinks England and America are the same, as we have the same language, but I felt like an alien as an English person living in America.

I, made in England, felt excluded, miffed, resistant to the idea of even visiting India, a position of increasing absurdity as, one by one, backpacking friends returned from the place with the standard anecdotal combo of nirvanic epiphany and toilet horror.

I remember learning new words, trying to figure out what common things like cider, finding myself upset that my parents couldn't help me understand this new culture, that it was up to me to interpret for them as well as myself.

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.

When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn't speak a word of English. In England, people might be very understanding about that, but in Bombay, they're not very forgiving. 'If you don't speak English, how do you expect to work in Hindi films?'

When you go to a new country, you don't have the same facilities as you had in the one before. You adapt very quickly to the circumstances.

My father, when he arrived in this country found it difficult.

I was actually born and raised in Puerto Rico. I moved to the States when I was 19. I was very impressed early on by being around people who spoke my language and ate the same food and listened to the same music, dressed the same. But then you look around and, you know, you're not in Puerto Rico.

Definitely that was a big part of my childhood: wanting to fit. As an immigrant, you talk funny, you look funny, you smell funny. I wanted to do nothing but fit in and talk English and sit with everybody else.

My biggest struggle was probably having to move from the Dominican to the United States to go to high school. Moving to Michigan, the weather, the language, I didn't speak English at all. That adjustment for me was difficult at the beginning.

Going to the U.A.E. for the first time was a real cultural shock. Everything was different. People didn't speak my language, it was all new, a huge change. But I loved it.