Mona Simpson Quotes

I was born in Nizhny Novgorod to a very poor family and unfortunately my father and mother separated when I was very little.

My parents separated when I was two, and then my father passed away, so I never really knew that side of the family.

No, my family is Russian, Georgian, via Ellis Island.

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.

My family's journey is something I am very proud of - in front of me, behind me and every part.

I grew up in a broken home, working class. My paternal grandmother raised me and my brother; my father was with us, and my mother lived in Jersey.

The real Liberace - and I'll preface this by saying that I didn't know the real one - was a man who didn't come from much. His father left him and his family for another woman. His father was a musician, which I thought was pretty interesting.

I never wanted to change countries; it's something that is part of me.

One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.

I grew up with a single mother, and I wasn't out shooting too many guns.

My parents didn't feel that they had any choice but to leave the Dominican Republic. They did, however, choose to become Americans, and they lived American values every day.

I grew up mainly with my mother, and I would see my father from time to time. But I didn't have a constant male figure.

I'm told I was born in Canada, but I was adopted, and I grew up in Maine and Massachusetts.

My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria.

I was raised by a single mother. We were definitely below the median income of our area.

My father left the family right after I was born, so my mother was working every single day to support me and my brothers.

I'm really the only artist in my family. I have one cousin who is a painter. I think I developed all of that from television and books - from being, essentially, an only child. I'm my mom's only child and my dad's fourth child, but separated by 14 years.

I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British instead of the other way around, I might have gotten here on my own.

I was born in South Africa and lived there until I was 19.

My mother's Polish; my dad was Irish.

I live in the U.S., but I'm from Brazil.

Because I grew up in a single parent home with my mom, growing up, things weren't always the best.

In the past a lot of Italians emigrated to Argentina, and now us Argentinians, and in my case, us footballers, are returning to Italy. We always try to keep our identity.

My mom eventually got out to Oxnard and started a produce company and was in the strawberry business. My pops was out of the picture by the time I was 7.

I grew up in St Louis, just with my mom.