Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Quotes

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.

I don't know what 'home' or 'abroad' is any more.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home anymore, and am amazed by that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadian s abroad in America.

When you come back to a country that you've left, you're in a very peculiar situation because, in a way, you don't belong to that country any more, even though when I'm in America I feel I don't belong there either.

I'll always be a foreigner.

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.

I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.

In England I am not English, in India I am not Indian. I am chained to the 1,000 square miles that is Trinidad; but I will evade that fate yet.

I've always felt like a foreigner wherever I've lived. I don't feel much towards my Italian or Scottish roots, although I do cook the pasta at home.

Lots of times you can feel as an exile in a country that you were born in.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

I always feel like a foreigner in America.

Although I hold a German passport, I feel very much alienated when I'm there.

Every time someone asks me where I'm from, I'm not sure how to answer that question... so I say I have no roots.

During my childhood in Cyprus, the British talked about the Cypriots as if the Cypriots were outsiders in their own country. And even though I was born in Cyprus, my parents were American, and so I was an outsider in the land of my birth.

Unfortunately, I think I drifted so much growing up that I don't have a strong sense of identity. I don't feel at home anywhere, and because of that, I think I'm more of a chameleon.

We moved around a lot when I was younger. I never really felt at home until we moved to Canada, but even then, I always felt strangely out of place and alien.

I don't really feel an allegiance to any of the countries I have lived in, even though I feel like part of them, and part of them is in me.

I didn't have just one place where I could say, 'That's my home.'

When you've moved 13 times, you lose track of where you're from.

To be an outlaw you must first have a base in law to reject and get out of, I never had such a base. I never had a place I could call home that meant any more than a key to a house, apartment or hotel room. ... Am I alien? Alien from what exactly? Perhaps my home is my dream city, more real than my waking life precisely because it has no relation to waking life.

And there are new kinds of nomads, not people who are at home everywhere, but who are at home nowhere. I was one of them

Everyone said to me growing up, "You're like an American. You have to go to America. That's your spiritual home."