Claire Messud Quotes

I had quite a scattered childhood. I was Irish in London, because I had my secondary school education there. I never really fitted anywhere. I didn't feel it was a negative thing, and I was never made to feel different - I just knew I was.

I just grew up in the States, so I feel like I identify more with the American culture.

Even with my family, I feel sort of 'other.' I'm the only one of my siblings who wasn't born in Jamaica. For a long time, I didn't feel very connected to Jamaican culture, but because I was raised so heavily with that cultural influence, I realized that my inner monologue is a Jamaican woman.

I had an Arabic background. but I lived a very scattered childhood. I didn't belong to any one culture, which meant I didn't have musical geographies in my head.

If pressed, I would say I feel British. It's where I grew up and where I choose to live, the culture that I love, but I feel perfectly at home in America, I don't feel like a tourist or anything.

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.

Sometimes when Australians go overseas, it's as though the 'Aussie' is refined out of them. I don't know why. It's never happened to me, because I'm really proud of it. I'm not embarrassed about where I'm from or who I am any more. I know who I am. I don't fit in everywhere, but I know where I do fit in.

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

Am I Latin? Am I American? What the hell am I? I love my culture and I'm very proud of my culture.

But I don't think of myself as a foreigner or a Frenchman! I just think of myself as a director.

I definitely feel Russian inside, even when I'm in America I feel Russian.

I often say to my friends that I felt too Puerto Rican to live in the States; then I felt too American to live in Puerto Rico. So when I settled back in Puerto Rico in 1992, I had to come to terms with all of that.

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.

My parents were first-generation immigrants. My mum wore a sari but at school and as a teenager and in my 20s I wanted to fit in.

As a 'parisien d'adoption,' I am only semicognizant of where I may fit at any given time into the French social fabric.

I don't really know what feeling Japanese or Haitian or American is supposed to feel like. I just feel like me.

Unfortunately, I think I drifted so much growing up that I don't have a strong sense of identity. I don't feel at home anywhere, and because of that, I think I'm more of a chameleon.

I'm proud of my Korean heritage, but I want people to know I'm American. It's not important to be the Korean Taylor Swift.

When I'm in Brazil, I'm not Brazilian at all; I am a gringo. And then when I'm in England, I'm not really English, but when I lived in Canada, I was considered too English. So I never really felt like I clicked somewhere or that I belonged to one place.

Human beings are many-layered creatures, and do not succumb to the hegemony of others as easily as historians and politicians sometimes imply. Those Welsh, Scottish and Anglo-Irish individuals who became part of the British Establishment in this period did not in the main sell out in the sense of becoming Anglicised look-alikes. Instead, they became British in a new and intensely profitable fashion, while remaining in their own minds and behavior Welsh, or Scottish, or Irish aswell.

I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport.

Because I was born in Casablanca and my parents were from the south of Spain, I do not have a big central root in France. I feel French but in a few ways, not at all French.

It took me many years to understand that my identity is more Israeli than Jewish.

I'm half Puerto Rican and half Jewish and so, in some ways, living in many worlds at once is where I feel most at home.

I was born in America, but I consider myself a Filipino.