Ilhan Omar Quotes

Being an immigrant gives you so much courage.

As an immigrant, I learned by watching other people.

The immigrant experience had a profound effect on me. It taught me the importance of hard work and the value of being entrepreneurial.

I thought it was quite wonderful coming to America. I think immigration is a very difficult thing, but America is a very wonderful place.

Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.

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

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 want to deal with somebody who comes from another country to the United States and has a family that comes. I don't care if it's a black family from Jamaica or a Hispanic family from Mexico. These issues need to be dealt with, but they need to be dealt with in the entertaining way.

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

My favorite movie is 'Coming to America.' It's a great movie! Eddie Murphy. Arsenio Hall. It kind of reflects my life - being from Canada and coming to America. I can kind of relate to it.

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

As a child, it was really hard because I'd be thrown into a new school and have to make new friends, or I'd sit in class for months without speaking the language, but as I got older, I welcomed the possibility of discovering new cultures and languages.

It's hard enough being American and trying to make it in an American world, but being Australian, you're from a whole different country and have a whole different way of doing things.

Being an immigrant and living in England, I feel like I lived in two worlds. There was the world that, when I was at school with my friends, was very English, and then I'd go home to another country, with exotic foods and colours. I have a sense of colour pairings, and that came from my background, I think.

I'm a first generation immigrant.

I'm excited to share my experience as an immigrant assimilating to a new country and an outsider stumbling my way into Hollywood.

If you move here from somewhere else, I often think if I move to Germany, for example, or if I move China and I go worship there I will understand and I'll be willing to give up a lot of my culture because I'm in somebody else's homeland. So I'm going to have to act German or Chinese, whatever that might mean.

I'm a third-culture child. It's an interesting concept. Having an American father, a South American mother, born in England, grew up in Hong Kong, went to school in Europe - it makes me a third-culture child, which means you take on the culture of the place where you live. So I'm very adaptable.

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

I don't know if it's because my father's from Argentina, that I'm the son of an immigrant, I don't know if its because I'm Jewish, but I have always been mindful that the best insights occur when you have some kind of an outsider perspective.

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.

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.

My mum and dad were speaking all the time about, 'In Sudan we do this,' and 'In Egypt we do that,' so I was very aware of cultural differences. I was confused growing up; it gave me a feeling of being an outsider watching others. But I think this is good for a writer.

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

It's fascinating when you're from another place, but you don't speak the language.