Mohsin Hamid Quotes

I have been a stranger in a foreign land.

I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

In a sense, I feel a lot more an outsider in Los Angeles than I did in Newfoundland.

Foreigners are not like the people I am used to here.

In Mumbai, I feel like a stranger.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

I was very surprised when I first started spending time in America. The culture shock was something I wasn't prepared for. I had a lot of work to do to try to begin to understand this enormous and complex country that I thought would be an easy process.

I think that foreignness is always with you. Indeed, I find California more foreign to me the longer I live here. In thirty years of living here on and off, it hasn't lost anything of foreignness. If anything, it has gained.

I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in the loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. (217)

At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.

I'm the last survivor of a dead culture. And I don't really belong in the world anymore. And in some ways I feel I ought to be dead.

Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign.

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.

I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood - what then?, I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain.

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

I didn't know a soul when I got to New York, and I felt really displaced. The first week I was euphoric, and then I realized how isolating the city can be.

One of the things that Ang brings to all of his projects is his deep sense of being a double exile, an outsider's outsider.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

I feel like a visitor just about everywhere.

I don't belong on this earth. I always feel out of place - like a visitor.

I never belonged anywhere. I just felt like a creature from another planet.

Being uprooted from your own culture, provided you take with you the way of thinking and being that characterises the more integrated social culture from which you come, is not as disruptive to happiness and well-being as becoming part of a relatively fragmented culture.

Everywhere I go, I feel strange.

I've always been an outsider; a displaced person.