Luis Alberto Urrea Quotes

I'm 50% Asian actually, so yes I was born in Paris but I feel more international than French so I can't talk about French women.

I struggled with being a Latino growing up in Los Angeles. I felt very American. I still do. I went to 35 bar mitzvahs before I went to a single quinceanera. I could talk all day about my culture and what it means to me.

My whole life, I grew up with this double vision, this vision of America but also Latin community.

My parents came from Calcutta. They arrived in Cambridge, much like the parents in my novel. And I found myself sort of caught between the world of my parents and the world they had left behind and still clung to, and also the world that surrounded me at school and everywhere else, as soon as I set foot out the door.

I think that a lot of the stories I would see was kids who are first-generation immigrants, watching them try to rip themselves from their family and their faith and kind of erase. I hadn't really seen anything where someone's trying to reconcile the two.

Growing up, I've always felt I was from two different worlds. I was born in the U.S., but my parents were born in Vietnam, and they raised my sisters and I with the parenting methods of the Vietnamese culture.

My parents were first-generation immigrants. My mum wore a sari but at school and as a teenager and in my 20s I wanted to fit in.

I've always loved writing, and my heritage has been interesting, growing up in a bi-cultural family. My mother being Vietnamese and my father being French, it's like an East-West meeting in my house.

I grew up thinking of myself as an American but also, because of my parents and the Iranian culture that was in our home, as an Iranian. So if there's any such thing as dual loyalty, then I have it - at least culturally.

When I was very young, my background as a Sikh-American made me aware of the tensions that underlie choice.

I would not call my family 'traditional Chinese.' We were more what I would term the Colonial Chinese.

Being American and being an outsider at the same time, it's a perspective I often bring to a character.

I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.

My closest friends from Israel make fun of me for becoming an American, and my American friends make fun of how Israeli I am... I can't win.

Nationality is a very curious thing. The blood is Scots and the temperament is Scots, but I am, in fact, 100% American.

I am the daughter of a Chicana and anglo. I think most days I am an embarrassment to both groups. I sometimes hate the white in me so viciously that I long to forget the commitment my skin has imposed upon my life.

My father is Indonesian Timorese, my mother Aboriginal Australian.

Dad's Jewish and Irish, Mom's German and Scotch. I couldn't say I was anything. My last name isn't even Downey. My dad changed his name when he wanted to get into the Army and was underage. My real name is Robert Elias. I feel like I'm still looking for a home in some way.

My mom came to the U.S. very young, and then she married very young. But she was never American. She was always Scottish and would make sure that I knew that I was, too.

There's a big difference between race and culture. Because racially, I'm an Indian man. Culturally, not at all.

I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of western life. It is in the family that children are groomed to practise, promote and pass on the norms of their parents' culture.

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.

As a child, I felt that the Indian part of me was unacknowledged, and therefore somehow negated, by my American environment and vice versa. Growing up, I was impatient with my parents for being so different, holding on to India the way they did, and always making me feel like I had to make a choice of which way I would go.

I often say to my friends that I felt too Puerto Rican to live in the States; then I felt too American to live in Puerto Rico. So when I settled back in Puerto Rico in 1992, I had to come to terms with all of that.

I was twice-born. I'm Mexican by nature and Hungarian by nurture.