Cai Guo-Qiang Quotes

Everybody wants to be American, it seems; I travel enough to know.

America is not the center of the universe.

My first inkling of what the Commonwealth might really mean came only when I escaped the oddly British-tinged Asia I had known and went to live in the Philippines.

When I've seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can't tell you what that phenomenon is.

I wanted to introduce a contemporary Asia to a North American audience.

I'm a little bit like a turducken: I'm sort of like an Indian person, wrapped in a British person, wrapped in an American kind of thing.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

We live in such a sheltered environment in the United States. I've been fortunate enough to have traveled all over the world, and I've seen things you only read about and see on the news.

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

Japan is very cosmopolitan - it values its origins, but a world view hovers above this narrow perspective. The interest of the Japanese in their folk culture is transcendental.

At different times my children went to Polish, British, and American schools, and they learned about 'the nation' in all of them.

I think I am kind of put on this Earth to speak of being between worlds in my films.

I've grown up surrounded by Americans and to a very large extent feel American. It sounds strange because I seem to be so quintessentially English in everyone's mind - and perhaps I am. Perhaps it's quintessentially English to have a fascination with America.

A lot of the attitude I used to have about being from New York when I was younger just disappeared when I started to the rest of the world.

I was born and raised in China, Mandarin is my first language, and I definitely know America. I think that will be my strength, to try and bring the two worlds together.

It's important that we have a global perspective and look abroad and learn from our neighbors.

I seem to be known as much by the moniker 'Mrs Funnybones' as my own name these days. The book was about how a modern woman looks at India and how India looks right back at her. I am glad that India seems to be looking back at me with a grin.

I've never left China. My family's been there for 600 years. But my architecture is not consciously Chinese in any sense. I'm a western architect.

It would be wrong to see the re-making of Asia, much less India, as a revolt against the West. Asia has indeed been re-built on the ruins of colonialism, but not on the ruins of all that the West has come to represent.

Hardly anyone in the world is an American

Speaking more than one language and living in a multicultural family and environment did not seem like anything but what it was: the world I lived in.

I don't think of myself as an American; I see myself as a human being.

I don't feel French at all. That was never really a concern, and it's limiting to think that way. I think Paris is more of a playground for international designers, so I don't really feel French. And I don't really want to feel French.

Thinking that other people might be better than you is what makes you Canadian, not American.

We must travel; we must go to foreign parts. We must see how the engine of society works in other countries, and keep free and open communication with what is going on in the minds of other nations, if we really want to be a nation again.