Rita Ora Quotes

I remember thinking, in Kansas my name will be Evett - which is my middle name. I didn't want to explain to anyone how to say Em-a-yat-zee.

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

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.

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

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?

There's a misconception that I can't relate to the quote-unquote 'Asian-American experience' because I didn't grow up with an Asian mom and dad. And that's just not true. I am Asian American, and so playing a girl who is half Korean, half white, but her white dad tried really hard to connect with her mom's heritage - that's very familiar to me.

I was born Moishe Ketzelbourd but the Indians call me Maurice Cougar.

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.

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

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

Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.

I was a redhead when I first came to America.

The name Zahra was to have been lman's own name at birth, but a senior member of the family changed it to lman at the last minute.

My mom really raised me, so I took her name before I ever thought about having a career. It was for personal reasons. My birth name is actually Max Deitch.

My sister married an American and took his name, and my brother has shortened Sayrafiezadeh to Sayraf. So now he's Jacob Sayraf, or sometimes Jake Sayraf. He made the change when he was a teenager, prior to the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. So I don't think it was motivated by any anti-Iranian sentiment in the United States.

When I was born, my dad and my mom gave me names, but in Africa, when your child is born, especially close family members can suggest names they want to add on. Maybe your grandmom and your grandpop have something to add to the name of the child.

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

I prefer to choose which traditions to keep and which to let go.

My dad's family is part British and Austrian, and my mother's family is from Goa, which is in the south of India. I looked different from everyone else, which now is such a blessing. It was harder at the beginning of my career.

I didn't grow up with my Kenyan family. I grew up in a small, conservative suburb of Chicago.

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.

When I think of my work, I'm aware that I'm American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents.

My dad was Jewish. My mom is not. So I was not raised anything.

I didn't choose to come to the United States, but being raised here has shaped exactly who I am today, and I can't imagine that being taken away from me.

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.