Karen Elson Quotes

As a child brought up in Paris, I dreamed of America, that lost world my parents had left behind - it was in my genes. Plus, American music has always been close to my own aesthetic, because of the mix of symphonic music with jazz.

I want people to experience what it's like being from Haiti, coming to America, being Wyclef - multicultural, multilingual.

My mom's Brazilian, so she and I definitely grew up with different perspectives. I was born in America, and she's from Brazil, so we have different ways of doing things. There's a bit of culture clash there.

My identity is not based on performance; it's based on something that's pre-determined by someone else, and I don't even understand what that is because I'm an African who came to America.

I live in Beverly Hills and I'm proud of it. The only things I miss are pie and mash shops and football games. I've lived in America longer than I lived in England. When I first got here, it just felt right to me. I like the open space, and the weather's great.

For decades, Indians have immigrated to the United States, joined our communities, and raised their families while maintaining their cultural heritage.

Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.

I lived in London for eight years and I like to say that I am two parts American and one part British because I lived there for a third of my life.

I would go to school and be American and then come home and be Greek.

I didn't choose to come to the United States, but being raised here has shaped exactly who I am today, and I can't imagine that being taken away from me.

I'm a first-generation kid in this country. I so identify with America and its culture. I'm a citizen, I was born here. I'm American. At the same time, like most first-generation kids, I have this other identity to another country back home, which is India.

Years after my parents made the United States their home, I had the joy of traveling to the Dominican Republic with my kids. They saw where it all started and how their grandparents' values survived and thrived in America.

I have this internal cultural struggle where there's a side of me that is very Brazilian that misses the food and culture, and a side of me that's very American that really loves the structure and predictability here.

During the tour of 'Circulations,' we spent a lot of time in Canadian Chinatowns. I was fascinated by the idea that you can cross the road and enter this dream world, this vision of China.

Being an Indian in the U.S. and growing up in the suburbs were the two things that really shaped my outlook.

My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.

I see the American experience as being defined by the immigrant paradigm of rupture and renewal: rupture with the old world, the old ways, and renewal of the self in a bright but difficult New World.

I always traveled. I left Cameroon when I was 11 years old. I lived in the USA, in Switzerland.

My writing has been shaped by the three countries - Sri Lanka, the Philippines and England - I have lived in.

My parents are Italian and British. They live in Berkeley now - we all moved there four years ago.

I went to an international school in Holland, and I didn't have any memories of growing up in the United States or England or any of these places which other novelists are able to write about in relation to their childhoods.

I don't have a deep link with England like, say, Jonathan Coe or Hanif Kureishi might demonstrate. For me, it is like a mythical place.

I don't really go around feeling very Irish at all. I don't go to Irish pubs. I've lived so many places, and I'm still so curious about the bigger world. It's grand to be alive in a time when mobility is so accessible.

The immigrant experience in 'Ilustrado' was only a small part of what I intended to be a broader look at the Filipino experience, even if that broader look was itself merely a specific perspective.

I'm not an American, but I have this weird connection to America in different ways through my dad living here for five years, my godfather being an American who I'm very close to.