Identity Ambiguity Quotes

I feel very German - and who can make himself a judge over what is German and what is not - in my ideas and the ideas of my spiritual brothers of German origin.

I'm still ambiguously ethnic. I could be Persian - I could be anything. But I'm Italian and Jewish, so I'm a citizen of the world; that's what I prefer.

Anybody that's ever been to Israel and to Palestine knows that you can't look at a person and tell if they're Israeli or Palestinian. You can assume. But I've seen Palestinians who look Swedish, and I've seen Israelis who are black.

America as a setting seems inexhaustibly fascinating to me, and I think there's something about the outsider viewpoint that works for me. Being of Jewish descent in England always carried a vague sense of being foreign, while not being a practicing Jew made it hard to think of myself as fully Jewish either. So living here in a way just clarifies that terminal outsider position - makes it somehow official, which I like.

I do feel Scottish in some way. Maybe it's to do with visiting my grandparents here every summer as a child, but I am aware of my Scottish ancestry. It's there all right, but it would be pushing it to label me a Scottish painter. Or, indeed, an anywhere painter.

I come from a place where I find it hard to identify with a label.

I've been lucky-my looks haven't put me into one category. I don't look like a blue blood. I don't look like a criminal. I don't look like anything.

I need to have one foot inside and one foot outside a culture to be able to write about it. For example, I couldn't write about the gay culture if I were wholly inside or outside of it. Finding that distance is always interesting. I jokingly say that when I'm in America, I write about Beirut, and when I'm in Beirut, I write about America. A lot of my friends in Beirut think I'm more American than Lebanese. Here, my friends think of me more as Lebanese.

In my career, I really set out not to develop too strong a persona so that you wouldn't have a hard time imagining me in any given role. I wanted to pleasantly confuse the audience on who I was.