Jane Green Quotes

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

Though I don't have any serious argument with Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods', I believe that Americans cease to be Europeans - the land makes them become Americans. You see it happening all the time when you travel around America.

We are American at puberty. We die French.

What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.

Living in Germany Africanised me.

I speak pretty fluent American, though I do so with a strong British accent, and I love America: The scale and the variety of it are astonishing to someone not born there, and I'm convinced that its energy and generosity have somehow rubbed off on me and affected my writing. For the better.

For me, even just being English was a whole sort of experience in as much as I'm Australian.

Immigrants to the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into their new country and reshape their identities accordingly.

My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself 'the American' at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.

My grandparents bowed to the Americans and sought to learn from them. My parents sought to be them.

You leave America, then you go someplace else, you begin to create something totally different.

Australia is so influenced by America. It's kind of in-between the U.K. and the States.

I'm still a proud Irishman, of course, but I've become an American citizen. I'm very, very proud of that.

My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.

I don't really go around feeling very Irish at all. I don't go to Irish pubs. I've lived so many places, and I'm still so curious about the bigger world. It's grand to be alive in a time when mobility is so accessible.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.

Only when I came to America did I think of myself as British.

When you move a border, suddenly life changes violently. I write about nationality.

My accent has changed my whole life. When I was younger, it was very Nigerian, then when we went to England, it was very British. I think I have a very strange, hybrid accent, and I've worked very hard to get a solid American accent, which is what I use most of the time.

I'm married to an American, so I guess that has changed my perspective on the subjects I can write about.

I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.

I'd always felt like a Canadian living in the U.S.

II grew up in Australia, but I'm not from there originally. Like, my dad's South American, so I know what that's like to grow up in a culture that's not your own.

When I go home to England, my friends all make fun of me for sounding American.

It's true that immigrant novels have to do with people going from one country to another, but there isn't a single novel that doesn't travel from one place to another, emotionally or locally.