Peter Morgan Quotes

I was actually born and raised in Puerto Rico. I moved to the States when I was 19. I was very impressed early on by being around people who spoke my language and ate the same food and listened to the same music, dressed the same. But then you look around and, you know, you're not in Puerto Rico.

My parents had an arranged marriage, as did so many other people when I was growing up. My father came and had a life in the United States one way and my mother had a different one, and I was very aware of those things. I continue to wonder about it, and I will continue to write about it.

Of course, everyone knows my story of being born in Russia and moving to the United States at 7. For a few years people would say, 'Well, she's living in the United States, but she's Russian.'

People don't know what it's like being the foreigner until they are one.

I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

I know a lot of Americans in Paris who have married Frenchmen. They keep bringing up their experience, the clash of civilizations, the clash of personalities.

It has been stressful to be a French resident in America.

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.

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

There are a lot of things that immigrants, especially Chinese-Americans, want to share with their children, but there are a lot of things they don't want to share.

My husband is from Venezuela and he cries when he needs to cry!

We are Americans when we go to war, and when we return, we are Mexicans.

My whole family has been having trouble with immigrants ever since we came to this country.

We are Martians who have come to earth to change everything—and we are afraid we will not be so well received. So we try to keep it a secret, try to appear as Americans…But that we could not do because of our accent. So we settled in a country nobody ever has heard about and now we are claiming to be Hungarians.

Countries like France, Italy and the Netherlands may pay lip service to inclusion, but the ethos in those places is that immigrants can never really become French, Italian or Dutch, no matter what their passports say. The emphasis is on tolerance and respect, but there’s no real expectation that foreign nationals fit in.

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.

I remember when I first came to America, nobody had a clue what a black Englishman was. I was either South African or Australian to them.

Growing up, I've always felt I was from two different worlds. I was born in the U.S., but my parents were born in Vietnam, and they raised my sisters and I with the parenting methods of the Vietnamese culture.

I've grown up a lot in England.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

A lot of people forget that Americans are immigrants. People are forgetting that, to where people have this attitude, 'We're Americans, go back to your country. Go back. This is a free country.' I always heard that growing up. I always heard that.

Definitely that was a big part of my childhood: wanting to fit. As an immigrant, you talk funny, you look funny, you smell funny. I wanted to do nothing but fit in and talk English and sit with everybody else.

To be a foreigner may be an advantage but disadvantage as well. It was advantage for me for sure.

I went back to Hong Kong for the first time in 17 years and I was culture shocked in Hong Kong.