Emayatzy Corinealdi Quotes

I changed my name at 14 because no one outside of my family could pronounce my first name correctly.

It was my dad's idea to change my name from Sahatciu to Ora. He said it would be easier to pronounce.

The first 10 years of my life, I lived as 'Matangi.' When I came to England in '86, my first week of school was terrible because I would put my hand up to answer things, and no one would choose me because they couldn't say my name. My auntie came from Europe to visit us, and she was like, 'Just call yourself something else.'

I couldn't imagine living my life with another name.

You get to a new school, and you're the new guy, or you're the foreigner, or you're the guy with the funny accent. That first day at school was a whole new opportunity to create a new persona.

I didn't emphasize my Jewishness because I wanted to. I just happen to have been raised in a family where everybody happened to talk like this, so why would I talk like somebody else?

Cordae is like my government name. I was like, just be myself. What's a better name than the name my mom gave me, or my pops gave me?

My first name is a boy's name. It's Tanner. I've always gone by my middle name but, yeah, my first name is Tanner. And King is my mom's last name. I took my mom's last name since I was 18.

It was never a conscious decision - I was introducing myself as Duffy and my friends were calling me Duffy, so I just knocked off the first half of my name. For me it's no big deal, but a lot of people want to unearth why I've called myself this. It's just what I'm known as, you know.

Our parents decided not to teach us Chinese. It was an era when they felt we would be better off if we didn't have that complication.

If a woman wants to take her husband's name, that's her choice, and I still think she can be feminist while doing that.

My grandfather came over from Puerto Rico and raised his kids speaking English so that it would be easier for them to assimilate.

People always think I'm Jewish and changed my last name from Rabinowitz.

I've always maintained my name will not define my films, my films will define my name. But I wish I was called Steve, or something else.

I'm Korean-American. Not Colombian. My parents are first-generation, and I'm like... in-between, because I moved over here when I was four or five.

I came here when I was almost 22. I'm perfectly bilingual, but I'm never going to sound like Sandra Bullock.

When you get into the third or fourth generation of Latino immigrants to the United States, you see the kids speaking more English than Spanish, and it's important that we don't lose our identity, our language.

America is remarkable, don't you think so? When I came to Washington, I was twelve years old. I spoke English with an English accent. It was assumed that it would go on in that way.

I chose my pen name when I was ten, because I knew even then that my legal name would be more trouble than it was worth.

Race, class, childhood experience, the books I found on my mother's bookshelf, the albums I found in my father's basement - these things are all part of who I am and will always be a part of my work.

I'm first generation in the country - my family's Mexican.

I always identified myself as non-Swedish. I was never discriminated against, because I looked Swedish and speak without an accent. But I had an outsider's perspective.

In many ways I'm similar to Barack Obama, who also has a strange name but was raised by a white American mother. His background is far more complicated than his name would suggest. Furthermore, the fact that I was a child during the hostage crisis has caused me to equate being Iranian with being alienated.

I was advised by an American agent when I was about 19 to change my surname.

I went to a Christian high school, so I went under my middle name. I don't think they would have accepted me in the school - 'This is Rebel'... so I have two middle names, Melanie Elizabeth, and I went under those. But Rebel's way cooler.