Sayed Kashua Quotes

Fusion food as a concept is kind of trying to quite consciously fuse things that are sometimes quite contradictory, sometimes quite far apart, to see if they'd work.

At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn't matter. You said, 'That's an American' because there's a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

I'm a little bit like a turducken: I'm sort of like an Indian person, wrapped in a British person, wrapped in an American kind of thing.

I think that people are getting really excited about different ethnic food, and almost even micro-ethnic food. So it's not just, 'I love Asian,' it's Szechuan or Hunan, this one style from China.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.

I am proud to be an American. Because an American can eat anything on the face of this earth as long as he has two pieces of bread.

You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?

What makes Harlem special is that at any given time, food seekers can not only find food deeply rooted in Southern, Latin and African traditions, but also can taste the newer Senegalese, Chinese, and Italian influences as well.

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.

In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?

I love food, all types of food. I love Korean food, Japanese, Italian, French. In Australia, we don't have a distinctive Australian food, so we have food from everywhere all around the world. We're very multicultural, so we grew up with lots of different types of food.

We all have that heritage, no matter what old land our fathers left. All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It's a breed — selected out by accident. And so we're overbrave and overfearful — we're kind and cruel as children. We're overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We're oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic — and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Can it be that our critics have not the key or the language of our culture?

Miami is one of these places where diversity is in our blood, where, you know, if you want to go have a Nicaraguan breakfast, a Cuban lunch, and an American diner dinner, you do.

All American fiction could be classified as immigrant fiction.

Obama's presence opened a new field for writers, and what began as curiosity about the man himself eventually expanded into curiosity about the community he had so consciously made his home and all the old, fitfully slumbering questions he'd awakened about American identity.

Some call me a Cuban hyphen American. I reject that. I don't believe in hyphenated Americans.

While I resonate deeply with my maternal cultural heritage, I identify as American.

Now, I love Israeli food, love 'Jerusalem: A Cookbook', love the homey exoticism, the fusion forged in the crucible of an eternally contested crossroads.

Sometimes I struggle with being American.

I've always had a complex relationship towards my identity as an American.

I love Britain, I lived there for nine years doing shows and things, but I don't know what a British sensibility is. I'd like to have someone tell me what an American sensibility is.

Some Americans need hyphens in their names, because only part of them has come over; but when the whole man has come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own weight out of his name.

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration. We fundamentally have been a culture that's been put together from the explosions of other cultures. But it's hard for us to see. We have blinded ourselves to the reality of what our country is.

I'm tired of hyphenated Americans.