Contrary to popular view, I've never been patronized in the Middle East. Men maybe treat women differently, but they do not treat them with disrespect. They don't hate women. It's a very different kind of mentality.
Age carries with it a double load of guilt.
Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty anti-social when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Gameboy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn't.
Language and accents govern so much of how people think about other people.
You feel like telling him you're not single in the way that he thinks you're single. After all, you have yourself. I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.
I understand more when I travel why people believe that the French are arrogant.
Also, I learned whether you are gay, bisexual, it doesn't matter, you know... because, at the end of the day, they're both gross. But mostly, I learned that elderly black women are wise beyond their years... but younger black women are prostitutes.
The Jews are not merely hook-nosed but understand money instinctively.
Many Continentals think life is a game; the English think cricket is a game.
Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.
The Germans are like women, you can scarcely ever fathom their depths - they haven't any.
Americans are funny people: first you shock them, then they put you in a museum.
At war with savages and idiots. To be a Frenchman abroad is to be miserable; to be an American abroad is to make others miserable.
Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.
I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.
America believes in freedom. The English don't believe in it. They don't believe in happiness.
The West has a better understanding of what the word sexual abuse or harassment means. There are some concepts that they understand way better.
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus When he said the world was round.
Women can't forgive failure.
It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.
Europeans have a different take [on nudity] than American actors do. They're not quite as hung up.
The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon with suspicion - unless he happens to be an American, when his ignorance of good manners is indulged.
There's a big difference between how the Anglo-Saxon world views India, or viewed India, and the way Europe views India.
A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.
One of the reasons the Europeans don't like the Muslims is because they are religious. Americans like the fact that they are religious. They just don't like the form it takes.
