Carlisle Floyd Quotes

My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

I'm a first-generation kid in this country. I so identify with America and its culture. I'm a citizen, I was born here. I'm American. At the same time, like most first-generation kids, I have this other identity to another country back home, which is India.

I'm more American than anything else. I grew up in China, but I was fulfilled at a young age by American music. It was my biggest inspiration.

I think I am kind of put on this Earth to speak of being between worlds in my films.

I've grown up surrounded by Americans and to a very large extent feel American. It sounds strange because I seem to be so quintessentially English in everyone's mind - and perhaps I am. Perhaps it's quintessentially English to have a fascination with America.

Traveling through France in regular times, for better or worse, I am simply perceived as an American.

Hardly anyone in the world is an American

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

Local color has a fatal tendency to remain local; but it is also true that the universal often borders on the void.

A British director directed 'American Beauty,' an important film about American life, and it didn't matter. What only mattered was everyone's sensibility.

But I don't think of myself as a foreigner or a Frenchman! I just think of myself as a director. Whether I'm French or Australian or whatever, it's really not important.

I don't really go around feeling very Irish at all. I don't go to Irish pubs. I've lived so many places, and I'm still so curious about the bigger world. It's grand to be alive in a time when mobility is so accessible.

My father came from Germany. My mom came from Venezuela. My father's culturally German, but his father was Japanese. I was raised in New York and spent two years in Rio. My parents met at the University of Southern Mississippi, and they had me there, and then we moved to New York. I'm not very familiar with Mississippi.

Things are so much global and Americanised.

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

Everybody wants to be American, it seems; I travel enough to know.

People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.

My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background.

I'm so proud of my Chinese ancestry, but I was born and raised in America, and I really believe in American values, our American system, our freedom, our liberties.

My head is in India, yet my body remains in Britain. I straddle the world like a colossus. Like a 5ft. 7in. colossus.

My first inkling of what the Commonwealth might really mean came only when I escaped the oddly British-tinged Asia I had known and went to live in the Philippines.

Though I don't have any serious argument with Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods', I believe that Americans cease to be Europeans - the land makes them become Americans. You see it happening all the time when you travel around America.

Can that make any sense - a Belgian artist living in Mexico and working in Afghanistan?

I'm definitely an American, because I grew up here. But I've lived very happily in Britain.