Contrary to popular view, I've never been patronized in the Middle East. Men maybe treat women differently, but they do not treat them with disrespect. They don't hate women. It's a very different kind of mentality.
Age carries with it a double load of guilt.
Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty anti-social when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Gameboy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn't.
You feel like telling him you're not single in the way that he thinks you're single. After all, you have yourself. I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.
The Jews are not merely hook-nosed but understand money instinctively.
Language and accents govern so much of how people think about other people.
Also, I learned whether you are gay, bisexual, it doesn't matter, you know... because, at the end of the day, they're both gross. But mostly, I learned that elderly black women are wise beyond their years... but younger black women are prostitutes.
The Germans are like women, you can scarcely ever fathom their depths - they haven't any.
I understand more when I travel why people believe that the French are arrogant.
Many Continentals think life is a game; the English think cricket is a game.
Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid.
Americans are funny people: first you shock them, then they put you in a museum.
Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.
I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.
America believes in freedom. The English don't believe in it. They don't believe in happiness.
At war with savages and idiots. To be a Frenchman abroad is to be miserable; to be an American abroad is to make others miserable.
The West has a better understanding of what the word sexual abuse or harassment means. There are some concepts that they understand way better.
A few hundred years ago there were no differences between magic and medicine.
Women can't forgive failure.
It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.
They all laughed at Christopher Columbus When he said the world was round.
Europeans have a different take [on nudity] than American actors do. They're not quite as hung up.
The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon with suspicion - unless he happens to be an American, when his ignorance of good manners is indulged.
There's a big difference between how the Anglo-Saxon world views India, or viewed India, and the way Europe views India.
I've never met a Mormon I didn't like. They're really nice people. They're so Disney. They're so Rodgers and Hammerstein.
