Shaun Tan Quotes

I was a redhead when I first came to America.

I wanted to do comedy because I left Malaysia and went to America. I got bitten by the Western, idealist, opinionated, democracy bug.

I'm married to an American, so I guess that has changed my perspective on the subjects I can write about.

I was born in Costa Rica and we moved to America where it was a whole new world for me.

I grew up in the Ukraine 'til I was about 7, and then I moved to L.A.

My mother is Greek and my father is Bulgarian. I am a first-generation American and native Los Angeleno. I was born and raised in Hollywood.

A familiar question for Australians is how much we are a product of our circumstances, and how much we are what we have made ourselves to be. In truth, by the act of migration the country was made: by that voluntary act and by the emigrants' ambitions it was built.

I hear from non-Afghan immigrants - Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, Arabs in France - all the time. These people have had to redefine their lives, which is what my family went through when we came to the U.S. in 1980.

My father was born in Denmark. He came to this country when he was 12 years old.

Coming from the Philippines to the U.S. did shape me in that it gave me perseverance.

My family immigrated to the States in 1981, when I was 14.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

We immigrated when I was 3 1/2 years old, to Toronto. But I'm still very, very close to my culture and - back home in Egypt.

My parents moved to San Francisco from India when I was a year old.

My mother is a German who was brought up in the U.K. So, there is so much cross-cultural exposure I had as a child. But Mumbai is my city.

Everything has changed since I came to China.

I have lived in the United States for half of my life, my entire adult life.

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 was born in New York City in 1926, four years after my parents and my brother migrated to the United States from the city of Odessa in Russia.

I'm interested in people who find themselves in places, either of their choosing or not, and who are forced to decide how best to live there. That feeling of both citizenship and exile, of always being an expatriate - with all the attendant problems and complications and delight.

In Sweden, I went to an English school, where there was a mishmash of people from all over the world. Some were diplomatic kids with a lot of money, some were ghetto kids who came up from the suburbs, and I grew up in between. There's a community of second generation immigrants, and I became part of that because I had an American father.

I was six when we came to this country. When I was 14 or so, I still had a lot of trouble with it.

I was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, and I came to attend high school in Massachusetts when I was about 15 years old.

I came here in 1974 to do a play, and then I went to L.A. I really like living in America. I feel more at home here than anywhere else.

We moved to Gambia from Sweden when I was six years old because my dad was from there. It was definitely a culture shock.