Ella Mai Quotes

As a European I had fit in almost seamlessly in New York for the last 25 years, but in Oklahoma I stood out like a sore thumb.

English is my second language, but in Hong Kong, they don't know that I'm from China. They think I'm from Hollywood because all the films they see are from here. China and Hong Kong are very different places, but they're starting to merge. Still the culture is very different.

I love being a foreigner.

I've gotten used to being a foreigner.

Definitely that was a big part of my childhood: wanting to fit. As an immigrant, you talk funny, you look funny, you smell funny. I wanted to do nothing but fit in and talk English and sit with everybody else.

I couldn't achieve the American dream in Japan.

It has been stressful to be a French resident in America.

The only time I used to feel like an outsider was when I first went to India.

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

I'm still a member of the Empire! Although I sometimes feel like an American with a British accent - you get contaminated after so long.

I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about.

I was 13 when my parents moved to Israel, and I was put in a Scottish mission school. Ninety-nine percent of the children were Israeli... Suddenly, I found myself speaking the wrong language, dressed in the wrong clothes, picked up by the wrong mode of transportation - an embassy car instead of a bus.

Anyone that has come to America past the age of eighteen will be able to understand when I say that you can never shake your accent.

Everyone thinks England and America are the same, as we have the same language, but I felt like an alien as an English person living in America.

I was very nervous about the accent. I was very nervous about being an American.

I have 5 children of my own. They are bilingual, like most second and third generations. But they speak primarily in English and they couldn't find anything on television that represented who they are in this country.

My accent does slip. When I arrived in England in 1978 at 18, I was shocked to find myself 'the American' at RADA. The English and the Americans have an intense relationship. They helped us out in the Second World War.

I'm an American by accent, and I grew up in the States, living there between the age of three and 24.

I consider myself Russian-American because I'm American by ethnicity and by passport, but I spent all my forming years over in the former Soviet Union in a Russian school. I never went to an American school. There was a lot of culture shock when I moved back to the States when I was 17.

There are certain situations, when you're in America, when people understand you better without an Australian accent.

I do a very good impersonation of an American - I went to high school here - but I've spent most of my life in Russia.

I love America. I eagerly became a citizen. I have no bitterness toward those casting directors who dismissed me because of my accent, nor toward the producers and directors who wanted to cast me but thought the audience wouldn't accept my accent. I think they're selling their audience short.

I'll always be a foreigner.

Bearing an eternal longing for Jewishness, I threw myself in all directions and left to work for another people. I am not one of those lucky ones raised in their own environment, whose work is normal.

There were a lot of kids from Puerto Rico at my high school in Florida; people always assumed I was Puerto Rican. Even now in California, I get talked to on the street in Spanish constantly!