Nicolas Winding Refn Quotes

I'm tired and nervous and I'm in America. Here you don't know that you live.

When you arrive in L.A. as an Englishman, you might as well be on the moon. People just don't understand you if you speak too fast, and most people there think you're Australian. Ordering was incredibly complicated. I was speechless.

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

Going to the U.A.E. for the first time was a real cultural shock. Everything was different. People didn't speak my language, it was all new, a huge change. But I loved it.

I've been out to LA a couple of times but, over there, the Grenouille in me always comes to the surface. I feel completely terrified, totally flummoxed, like I don't understand what the hell is going on. I've no desire at all to go back there.

I didn't know a soul when I got to New York, and I felt really displaced. The first week I was euphoric, and then I realized how isolating the city can be.

But I was feeling quite down at the time. I was living in L.A., which was kind of weird for me.

I remember that coming to America was scary for me because everything here is just bigger, better, shinier, you know?

I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale.

The first time I moved to L.A., I was there for five months, and my health got so bad because of how depressed I was.

I remembered what it was like: the weirdness, being the odd man out, trying to make my way around campus, and trying to figure out who my friends would be, who to steer clear of. I wrote it all down in a fanciful way - the feelings of alienation, the feelings of uncertainty, of being away from home for the first time.

…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

I came into Chicago in winter - I'd never been so cold in my life! I was very homesick, and a poor student at that time. America seemed so different and so filled with amazing things - and almost all of them were out of my reach.

I did not enjoy Cambridge. But I shouldn't blame Cambridge alone. I wasn't ready for university or for the wrench of leaving home. It was a big cultural shock.

I couldn't settle in Italy - it was like living in a foreign country.

You can feel as brave as Columbus starting for the unknown the first time you enter a Chinese lane full of boys laughing at you, or when you risk climbing down in a Tibetan pub for a meal of rotten meat.

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 remember being this little girl missing her daddy and living so far away in France and from anything that was familiar to me. I felt so different and so isolated. When you're removed from everything that's familiar, you realize who you are.

Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.

I lived in England to learn English. When I went to England for the first time, it was like being on the Moon. I had no friends, I couldn't speak the language. I was very isolated.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.

I'm always struck when I go somewhere I've never been before, especially if it's in my home town, by just how different the atmosphere can be, and how disorienting it can be - especially if there's any kind of trouble.

In 1969, we emigrated to Australia. It was a big change. The heat, the flies, and the completely different tinned meats. The shock was so great, I stopped reading books for nearly a year.