Max Boot Quotes

I know my own deficiencies, one of which is that I had lived away from America for such a long time. It's called expatriate.

In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn't fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.

Peru is a country where more than half the people would emigrate if given the chance. That's half the population that is willing to abandon everything they know for the uncertainty of a life in a foreign land, in another language.

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

I left my country because I was forced to, and I do not think that I am going to lose my language because I live in England.

The first 10 years of my life, I lived as 'Matangi.' When I came to England in '86, my first week of school was terrible because I would put my hand up to answer things, and no one would choose me because they couldn't say my name. My auntie came from Europe to visit us, and she was like, 'Just call yourself something else.'

I came to the States when I was ten, and that was, in many ways, very hard.

I was in the U.S. about 15 years. Especially in New York. And then I came back to Japan.

I came over when I was 10 years old, which was very difficult because everybody made fun of me.

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.

What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S.

I was never very interested in my own experience, I think, in fact, if my films have a common link, maybe it's being a foreigner - it's common for people who are born abroad - they don't know so well where they belong.

A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of 'border,' and that is what I have experienced.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.

It's not a lighthearted decision to change your language, your country, your citizenship, and come to a world where you don't know anybody, to leave a place where you've had opportunities to build friendships from childhood. That's quite a big decision to make.

My parents moved to England with that immigrant ethos of self-betterment, but I don't think they expected the kind of grief they experienced.

I'm just trying the American dream. To work here in the U.S., you have to commit and be here. For many years, it was back and forth, back and forth, and it didn't work. But I'm always open to working in Spanish.

When I reached America, there was so much space and colour. The possibilities seemed endless. At least that's how I felt at 18. But of course, I didn't have to take the usual immigrant route of battling to find a job and a home in a strange country. I could play tennis. I spoke the language, and I was making money. It was easy, really.

When I was six years old, my parents told me that we were moving back home to Armenia. I didn't really understand what was happening. My father had stopped playing football, and he was at home all the time.

When I first moved from Shanghai when I was five, I just thought of myself as Chinese.

When Nigeria actually gave me the call-up I thought 'oh, it's going to be a challenge, I don't go back there a lot, I don't really speak the language.' I wasn't speaking the language as fluently as I am now, so it was always going to be a challenge, but it was a challenge I decided to take and change nationalities.

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.

People don't know what it's like being the foreigner until they are one.

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.