Urmila Matondkar Quotes

When I came to India, it's just a different country, but the culture was same that I grew up in.

If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow.

I really got the 'Rhoda' flavor from studying my stepmother, Angela, who's Italian, not Jewish. There's really so little difference between the speech patterns and family attitudes of Jews and Italians in the New York area, anyway.

It only takes a room of Americans for the English and Australians to realise how much we have in common.

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.

But if you go from Moscow to Budapest you think you are in Paris.

The thing that I like about Germany is that Germans are so much like us. It's not like going to some other countries, where the differences are overwhelming and you walk around in a fog. Germans are so similar to Americans.

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

What's the point of being an Australian guy traveling through India if you are going to go to India to meet other Australians?

Iranians call California and Iran 'sister cities;' they're very much alike. Iranians feel at home here and the weather is so close to Iranian weather.

When I was travelling in Rajasthan people were waving hands, and it felt like I was visiting my own constituency.

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.

In the States, you can buy Chinese food. In Beijing you can buy hamburger. It's very close. Now I feel the world become a big family, like a really big family. You have many neighbors. Not like before, two countries are far away.

I'm from Canada and my wife is from St. Albans, so I feel a great kinship with the Brits.

Whenever I visited China in the past, the relationships always felt superficial; there was no time where I felt those moments of conflict and delight that make you feel close to another person. But since I started touring there in 2004, I would always collaborate with local musicians, and that opened up a new level of intimacy.

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.

Over the summer I thought that I would seek out non-Americans as friends, just for diversity's sake. Now I find that I want to be around Americans - people who I know are thinking about our country as much as I am.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.

I immediately was captured by 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist.' It gave me a springboard into contemporary Pakistan and a dialogue between Pakistan and the rest of the world.

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

There's a misconception that I can't relate to the quote-unquote 'Asian-American experience' because I didn't grow up with an Asian mom and dad. And that's just not true. I am Asian American, and so playing a girl who is half Korean, half white, but her white dad tried really hard to connect with her mom's heritage - that's very familiar to me.

When we tour, there's always this unique quality to every town you visit... Touring, you get a sense of a collective identity for different cities. That's one of the things I love about my job.

When you get a bunch of Latinxs together, we get to handle our stories. A cultural shorthand happens.

Pop culture and entertainment can be dismissed as surface, but it's not. It's the language we all speak, and it's the connection point between people all over the world.