Top 15 Expats Quotes & Sayings

I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife's job and found the inspiration for 'The Expats.'

Hemingway is a baby when he turns up in Paris, but he's an ambitious baby. And he has the talent. And he's there to stage his breakthrough. So many of the expats who were there at that time were there to do precisely that. It was an ambition-fueled town.

For some Chicago expats, food is the medicine that blunts the pain of separation.

There is that potential of the expats coming back to the Philippines. But sadly they are no opportunities, no incentive for them to come back home. Successive governments have, in fact, been training them to export them rather than working on the economy to welcome them home.

Expats are a self-selecting group of outgoing, confident people - if you're not those things, you probably don't choose this adventure - and the lifestyle is very conducive to making fast, close friends.

Such is the nature of an expatriate life. Stripped of romance, perhaps that's what being an expat is all about: a sense of not wholly belonging. [...] The insider-outsider dichotomy gives life a degree of tension. Not of a needling, negative variety but rather a keep-on-your-toes sort of tension that can plunge or peak with sudden rushes of love or anger. Learning to recognise and interpret cultural behaviour is a vital step forward for expats anywhere, but it doesn't mean that you grow to appreciate all the differences.

Ironically, if only because over the years I've known so many - from college deans to studio executives to European expats - who come to Los Angeles aspiring to nothing other than living in Topanga, I wound up there by accident.

Before I wrote my first novel, 'The Expats,' I spent nearly two decades at various arms of publishing houses such as Random House, Workman, and HarperCollins, mostly as an acquisitions editor. But a more accurate title for that job might be rejection editor: while I acquired maybe a dozen projects per year, I'd reject hundreds upon hundreds.

Having 'The Expats' not be 'wholesale-y' rejected by the world made it possible for me to write the second book and have a publisher buy it before it was entirely written. And it made it easier for me and my publisher to get 'The Accident' out into the world without trying to convince people to pay attention to it the way you do for a first novel.

For me making friends with locals is hard, mostly because my lack of Vietnamese language skills and being retired I have limited access to locals in the work place. Though for me it is hard meeting expats as well, as most expats work here and make friends through their jobs.

I don't know a writer who doesn't feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren't there.

'The Expats' is a thriller, but one that tends more toward general fiction than toward breathless pulp.

America is a nation of immigrants, but it is also a nation of people who never emigrate. Notably, Americans living outside the United States are not called emigrants, but 'expats.'

As I got older, I had more experience with borders. Some literal - living in the dramatically blue misty mountains on the line between North Carolina and Tennessee, and living in California - home to expats, transplants, and refugees from both sides of innumerable borders.

'The Expats' would not exist without e-books.