Alan Furst Quotes

It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

Maybe I am not French, maybe I am from nowhere.

I've never felt British. I'm just not interested in national identity. I don't know why.

Sari Nusseibeh is a man without a country.

I'm as proud to be Chinese as I am American.

We used to have a view that to really be a good Australian, to love Australia, you almost had to cut your links with the country of origin. But I don’t think that was right and it never was right.

I don't even know if I'm British any more. I'm transatlantic, I'm European.

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.

It was very hard for me, for most of my life, to feel American, or call myself American, and that is a very complicated topic that would require a very long conversation.

I have always found it jarring to encounter people born and raised in, say, Switzerland, who are denied its citizenship and still considered Algerians or Turks.

I love being a foreigner.

When I go to Brazil, I feel like an American, and in the U.S., I always notice the traits that make me Brazilian.

Only when I came to America did I think of myself as British.

When Bangladesh refused to renew my passport, I used U.N. travel documents. You can't disown your country.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

I'd always felt like a Canadian living in the U.S.

I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, 'What are you?'

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.

I was born in the USA, which many people still find hard to believe.

It's strange; when I was younger and people would ask, 'Where are you from?', I'd say, 'West Africa', which was odd because I'm obviously not African, but it was my home.

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.

I know I'm British. I haven't spent much time in the U.K., but my parents are British, my family heritage is British, so if I wasn't British, what would I be? I am British.

The Africans know I'm not an African. I'm an American.