Foreign Perspective, Foreign Perspectives Quotes

We, as Americans, have so much to learn here. We have a shockingly low level of global awareness and familiarity and little idea of how the world sees us. And those disturbing facts keep getting us into a lot of trouble.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

I love the States and their attitudes about entertainment.

I'm not an American but I have always had the outsiders' respect for the American people and the American way.

You’re so American. You believe everything is possible, everything will come. I know differently.

It's interesting how the view from abroad can shift and remake perceptions of homegrown celebrities, the ones who are part of the gross domestic product.

It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.

Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that's the subject that interests me the most. I'm attached to it, critical, but it's definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I'm overseas.

I get much more information about the rest of the world from people who are not Americans. You get a distance from America that is useful for a journalist; useful for my perspective on the world.

Sitting in America, we never get to know the other side in any kind of believable way. We have so many movies about Iraq, Afghanistan, and this and that, but there is never a character from that side.

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.

I have a very unsatisfactory and incomplete knowledge of Brooklyn and cannot discuss specifically either what you can do here or what possibilities the city shows in an artistic way. I am not a foreigner but coming here as I do after a long stay abroad, I think things here strike me much as they strike a foreigner.

I am not any hate-America person. I really came here for positive reasons.

I wouldn't make an anti-American film. I'm one of the most pro-American foreigners I know. I love America and Americans.

Going to any place that you view as more politically oppressed than your own country, there's a weird tendency to assume that the whole existence is determined minute by minute by the political reality, but of course, that's not the case for any of us.

I've gotten to really, really like being back in the States. It's so easy being in your own country, and I really like Americans - typical American towns and provincial college towns are my ideal place to be.

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

I miss New York. I like the country and I like the people. However, the U.S. political and legal system is prone to overreaction.

If I were a person who was non-American, I would think humanitarian intervention is just another name for United States imperialism.

I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.

My wife is French, and so I get to see America through her eyes, which informs a lot of little moments. It means I can poke fun at very particular things about us.

I don't really have that much contact with Americans. I mean, I see the oddest things on the Internet, I suppose. And I've got a couple of American friends, but they are Anglophiles anyway because they've decided to come live here.

When I was little, I didn't really travel - from the suburbs to Paris was already a journey. I had a foreigner's eye on the city, and I still enjoy that point of view. Then there's the fact that one of the things that touches me most is injustice.

Americans are an odd bunch, but they grow on you.

She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.