I don't think my generation carries the weight of World War II anymore. But I've got to tell you, even if we don't really talk about it, we get reminded constantly by other people or other countries. I get offered a World War II movie at least once a week just because I speak German and was born there. I have always stayed away from it because I didn't want to be put into that box.
The great thing about being a standard-issue, straight white person is you have so much time. Gay people, people of color, we have less time! We have to be a living Learning Annex to everybody. We don't have time to master hobbies like skipping rocks along lakes.
I don't want to take too much responsibility, where I'm like, 'Oh, I'm representing Asia.'
Excessive literary production is a social offense.
There's a history of enslaved African-Americans having to make their slave masters comfortable. This business of what we call skinning and grinning - that is something African-Americans are very much cognizant of.
It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than isgood for them.
The problem with being Irish... is having 'Riverdance' on your back. It's a burden at times.
Every society gets encumbered with what is trivial, with dead wood from the past, and with what is positively perverse.
I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.
Rome is a place almost worn out by being looked at, a city collapsing under the weight of reference.
It shapes my reality, where I was born, in two ways. One, I was burdened by the culture I was born in. And secondly, it gave me a context with which to actually see with wise eyes as well. So culture is both a burden as well as an opportunity for us to look at the world through eyes of wisdom.
We have a really rich and diverse heritage in my family - but I sometimes felt it was a bit of a chain round my neck in the Labour party if truth be told.
For a novelist, it’s kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture. That said, I’m in a unique position to speak on behalf of Afghanistan on certain issues that I feel are important, particularly the issue of Afghan refugees.
But when culture becomes a baggage, things don't work. What is good about anything that feels like a baggage? I think we should let go when it feels like a burden. Hold on to the things you love. Then it will be a natural process.
I think, as a writer, sometimes you do worry, 'Am I just writing, or am I putting the burden of African-Americans on my shoulder and carrying it?' But if we just write the stories that we're supposed to write, that's when we have the biggest impact.
For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like.
The purity of Jewish upbringing - the restrictions that one carries through life being a 'nice Jewish girl' - what a burden.
Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray-a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical & moral deformities
For a novelist, it's kind of an onerous burden to represent an entire culture.
As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.
The Germans are prisoners of their past.
