"Anyone who adjusts to this society is a bastard. Anyone who says you should live and be happy within the society is no good."
"The Anatolian Greeks are completely terrorised people. My father's family comes from the interior of Asia Minor, from a city called Kayseri, and they never forgot they were part of a minority. They were surrounded with periodic slaughters — or riots: the Turks would suddenly have a crisis and massacre a lot of Armenians, or they'd run wild and kill a lot of Greeks. The Greeks stayed in their houses. The fronts of the houses were almost barricaded, the windows shut with wooden shutters. One of the first memories I have is of sleeping in my grandmother's bed and my grandmother telling me stories about the massacre of the Armenians, and how she and my grandfather hid Armenians in the cellar of their home … The Armenians were lustier, their history a much bolder, more rebellious one. The Greeks were crafty, they did not rebel and they did not get killed as much. … [In America, m]y father traded in rugs. He was brought to this country by my uncle, who had a great deal of energy and cunning. They say the Jews have cunning, that they're sly people: the Anatolian Greeks are the same kind of people. If you want to know why: they couldn't protect themselves by force, by the sword or by arms, they were constantly being demeaned, so the only way they could get along was by being sly, by never saying the wrong thing. The first thing I learned was to shut up. My father used to tell us: 'Say nothing, don't mix in, don't mix in other people's business, stay out of trouble,' and that of course was the very opposite of the Yankee tradition. My first wife was a Yankee; her tradition was never to say anything except exactly what you felt and say it immediately without any omission or qualification. That's one of the reasons I admired and loved her so much: she was the opposite of the way I was brought up. But I was cautious and careful and crafty."
— Elia Kazan, in Kazan on Kazan (1974), cited at http://www.adherents.com/people/pk/Elia_Kazan.html