Rabih Alameddine Quotes

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.

Through travel, you discover a new aspect to your personality. You discover things which you wouldn't seated in the confines of your home.

Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.

There are things that you write when you're 20 and there are things that you write when you're 40 and then there are things that you write when you're old.

I think you feel more liberated in a foreign country. You're more open. You understand less about the social constructs that exist in a certain place, so you take people more at face value, and you're also taken more at face value, which makes you more able to be yourself.

I'm trying to see my own country with fresh eyes.

I've changed my music from time to time so I'm hoping that I can completely change my life from time to time, too. Like live in another land, in another place, and just get completely soaked up in another way of being. Could be in this country or another country, somewhere were you can be reborn a number of times not just creatively, but personally as well. I guess I want to go through life as more than one person.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

I think living in a new country gives you a certain bravery that you don't have when you live in your own country - because of the freedom it gives you.

Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

It's not that I bounce ideas off of my children as much as it is that having children has had a profound effect on the way I see the world. They have mined my soul. They've made me a better person and therefore a more empathetic writer.

It's easy for me to say that now, now I'm a father, I've got a four-and-a-half year old boy, I'm a different person. Well, I'm still the same person, but I'm different.

I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in.

Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.

I grew up in the age of discount air fare, and for me, the act of joining a culture was a great way about learning about that different culture. So I grew up in the South, and went to college in the North, and found out that I learned about myself as a Southerner by leaving the South and going to the Northeast.

What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.

Does having a wife and kids change your act? Yes, but only in the best way. It gives you weight and authority. It also makes you closer to the audience because the audience is married and has kids.

Living in different cultures helped me work out who I was going to be, separate from where I came from.

Sometimes, growing up, I tried to be very Latina; I would change my voice... experiment with my hair a lot, trying to figure out who I was in a primarily white school.

Six months later I was in Paris. I was 16, and it all started to happen.

Once I started dancing, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was as a child.

What I've observed and what I've imagined - and definitely what I'm hoping - happens as you get older is that there's a mellowing, an acceptance that comes with time. I guess that I'll find out.

Certain things give you another perspective in life.