Cultural Ambiguity Quotes

Looking the way I look, whenever anybody's looking for a light brown funny guy, I get the call... I'm 100 percent Greek, but I look like I could be Indian or Middle Eastern or Hispanic. If it's ethnic, they'll try and put me in it.

As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.

In English, my name means hope. In Spanish, it means too many letters. It means sadness. It means waiting. It is like the number nine, a muddy color.

To be a foreigner may be an advantage but disadvantage as well. It was advantage for me for sure.

When Pakistan beat England at cricket, my Pakistani cousins remind me how English and British I am. When they say, 'You're one of the Queen's advisers,' for them it's, 'Wow - anything's possible in the U.K.'

I think of myself as an Indian comedian, but I've had British and American schooling. I always had this feeling of not fitting in anywhere, of observing situations from the outside.

Sometimes I have a very fleeting emotional dance with a fleeting phrase, like 'half-Mexican.'

I never am sure what nationality I am as my village [in Alsace-Loraine] is part of different countries from day to day.

My father is black and my mother is white. Therefore, I could answer to either, which kind of makes me a racial Lone Ranger, caught between two communities.

I guess you could say I'm kind of Jewish but not really.

I think I may well be a Jew.

I'm often mistaken for Spanish or Latin descent.

The South: What is this place? What's different about it? Is it different anymore? Good questions. Old ones, too. People have been asking them for decades. Some of us even make our living by asking them, but we still don't agree about the answers.

I'm half Jewish, I'm half black, I look in-between. I dress funny. I play all these different styles of music on one record. It's like, What is he doing?

I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I'm from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.

I have many friends who are both Mexican and Mexican-American and others who, I guess you would say, are somewhere in between. The ironic thing is that all three of those categories often exist inside of the same family.

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

I wish somebody knew whether or not I'm Jewish.

On 'Hairless Toys,' I've tried to create an ambiguous character to go with an ambiguous record. She's anything but rock n' roll - she's so not rock n' roll that, in a twisted way, she's kind of radical. She's like someone from my memory, almost like my mother, and she's lost in some space-time between the 1960s and the late '80s.

For Americans I'll always be Israeli, and for Israelis I'll always be American. But I really have no need for definitions.

Being culturally ambiguous and having to deal with bullying made me strong and independent.

As a global citizen, I sometimes feel like denying my identity.

There's something in the German language that makes you feel like you're getting a hug and a backstab at the same time.

… the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of western peoples, instead of the most westerly of easterns, that he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle.

I can change my appearance by doing simple things. People ask, 'What's your ethnicity? Are you part Asian? I can't figure you out.' That gives me range with the roles I play.