Elif Safak Quotes

Living in different cultures helped me work out who I was going to be, separate from where I came from.

Growing up in any big city, you get exposed to so many beautiful cultures. I've grown up with a lot of open eyes around me that's influenced my eyes to open.

At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn't know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

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.

We just kind saw the images and knew the cliches, so to have the opportunity to go there and learn something about Russian music and about Russian people and to see things apart from being a tourist.

Travelers never think that they are the foreigners

Travel is the only way to get empathy for other people's mindsets - to know their struggles and what they're drawn to.

Some things are really sacred and important to other cultures, so you have to be aware, politically, about those things before you just adopt them.

The unknown makes people uncomfortable. And even living in a city that's as cosmopolitan as New York City is, there's so many things I don't know about other cultures, even though I encounter other cultures - maybe even 18 or 19 of them - when I get on a subway car every day.

Other people's traditions look charming and decorative and exotic. They're nice places to visit on holiday, but you wouldn't want to live with one.

There's a kind of integrity to being an observer of a culture. I think Canadians have that privilege innately. We are, like, the observers of the American culture.

Colombian culture has had a huge influence on me and taught me a different way of looking at things - I was always different from the people I went to school with, and I learned to embrace that.

The joy of tasting different cultures is it gives you a broad perspective, and you don't judge people from stereotypical characters you see in films.

Culture isn't all just about what can be tweaked and twitched in the simplest possible way. As people move around, they literally don't see what's around them, because they're wedded to earworms that are burrowing into their heads endlessly in a kind of negotiation with these tiny screens.

I really like to discover a new culture, a new country, a new rhythm of living. I really, really like that. I think that's the most enriching thing, for my nature, because I like the psychology of people.

I don't think the American government has a lot of respect for culture.

Africa doesn't leap on you immediately; it seeps slowly, and it's incredibly important to be respectful and humble there.

I'm not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.

But what I'm very interested in, whether it's writing, whether it's hosting a show, whether it's cooking food, I'm just into the discussions of identity, culture and the politics of culture.

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.

I've got to where am in life not because of something I brought to the world but through something I found - the wealth of African culture.

My mum and dad were speaking all the time about, 'In Sudan we do this,' and 'In Egypt we do that,' so I was very aware of cultural differences. I was confused growing up; it gave me a feeling of being an outsider watching others. But I think this is good for a writer.