I've never felt like an American

 "But no one can tell me that Edmund Wilson feels like an immigrant's son. Bill Gibson and his wife asked people at the Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s house the other day—have you always felt like an American? And I said—I've never felt like an American. But that's because I've given up trying to feel like an American. The lack of tradition is the lack of familiarity in many basic associations—and I know that I am outside them, trying to figure out what to do and what to think in relation to many basic American traditions. . . Yet meanwhile the 'Americans' feel deprived of what they all had. They feel that it's no longer their country."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook