Hisham Matar Quotes

I find myself more at peace when I live in Europe.

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

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

I was born in London, and my family is here. America is an interesting place, but it's incredibly different culturally. It doesn't take long being there before I want to get back.

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

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.

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

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

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.

A lot of the Indians who came to North America in the '70s, and who made very successful adjustments, always had an idea of the India that they had left, not realizing that the India that they had left has changed more profoundly than the America they came to.

If you take my own life, the longer you stay in a country, you almost lose your former self and become this third-party person who is caught in between two worlds.

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.

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.

I'm French - it's less important. Meaning, I remain a Frenchman in America, but I adapt to American culture. I feel good there - but I'm still a foreigner.

I'm very comfortable in the U.S. and Europe, but I feel completely out of place in the rest of the world, mostly because I never spent time outside the U.S. and Europe until I was in my 30s.

I love being a foreigner.

I actually love the challenge of being in a new place where I'm so obviously the foreigner.

I spent 13 years in Spain, and when you spend that amount of time somewhere, it has a deep influence on you.

I always felt that I wasn't as American as Americans and then I realised when I got back to the Philippines that I was not Filipino.

Moving to France is not the hard part. Living here is more difficult. Of course there are many benefits but it's not always easy especially if you don't speak the language.

I went back to Hong Kong for the first time in 17 years and I was culture shocked in Hong Kong.

When I moved from Canada to Korea, I experienced a massive culture shock. I wasn't familiar with Korean culture at all and was very surprised at the hierarchical elements of Korean culture. However, at the time I was determined to succeed so I became a sponge and just soaked in everything I could.

As a kid, I would never have imagined I would live in England for four years. I am very happy and contented that my daughter is growing up in a country as developed as this one.

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.

I feel a little schizophrenic because my life is so totally different from here, obviously. And the French values are so different from American values.