Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes

I am constantly swimming on the margin, neither 100% American, French, nor Lebanese. I am none of those. I am the result of those three. Sometimes it's an asset: no one can put you in a category. That I do not make typical Lebanese, European or American films does not bother me.

So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else.

The experience of being a mixed person is all over the place - one of my best friends is Chinese and Italian; my other best friend is Lebanese and Trinidadian. The mix of heritage, culture or identity is something that our country is built on.

I'm half-Welsh, half-Russian. My maternal grandmother is Russian. I've very much a mongrel, which is good in a way because it makes me quite a blank canvas.

My head is in India, yet my body remains in Britain. I straddle the world like a colossus. Like a 5ft. 7in. colossus.

My father is Indonesian Timorese, my mother Aboriginal Australian.

I have a variety of readers from across the diasporic community, not just from South Asia. I like to write large stories that include all of us - about common and cohesive experiences which bring together many immigrants, their culture shocks, transformations, concepts of home and self in a new land.

My work has been much more Caribbean and eclectic. I am interested in people, and where they come from happens to have fallen within an area of Africa.

After so many years, I feel more American than anything else, but I'm also Romanian and whatever other oddities of temperament I picked up elsewhere, in Transylvania or France, for instance. These days, everybody is both an exile and a resident - they don't call it the global village for nothing.

I've always felt very much from a mixed culture - mainly English and French, but also Nigerian, Thai, Mexican. Everything's had its influence on me.

The question really isn't whether I'm American, Russian, Iranian, Azerbaijani, or anything else. I've been shaped by all these people and cultures and I feel quite comfortable among all of them

Being South Asian in the U.K. is like being Latino in the U.S., I would guess. It's a bit more hood. You see things; things happen. I was bouncing between worlds. You're acting from a very early age, when you have to code-switch like that. I'm a hybrid, a mongrel. I think many people live that life.

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

I am very Latino in everything I am and I do, but there's a part of me that's also something else. I'm reflective of the way this country's gonna be in the next 40 years. More multicultural is what we'll see.

You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift.

I love being a foreigner.

I don't think there is only one Arab culture or a pure Arabness. We are very multiple, especially our generation, which is very multilayered.

I ended up very American and very Indonesian and a little bit of a lot of things.

Culturally, I'm not 100 percent Korean. I'm very mixed and very open.

I still feel Ghanaian, but my mentality is more European.

I'm Italian, but I'm also a little Brazilian: Pirlonho, if you like.

Local color has a fatal tendency to remain local; but it is also true that the universal often borders on the void.

America gave the world the notion of the melting pot - an alchemical cooking device wherein diverse ethnic and religious groups voluntarily mix together, producing a new, American identity. And while critics may argue that the melting pot is a national myth, it has tenaciously informed the America's collective imagination.

I'm unique - a cosmopolitan mix.

In Sweden, I went to an English school, where there was a mishmash of people from all over the world. Some were diplomatic kids with a lot of money, some were ghetto kids who came up from the suburbs, and I grew up in between. There's a community of second generation immigrants, and I became part of that because I had an American father.