Bozoma Saint John Quotes

We left Germany when I was 11.

So that when I came from Panama... my family was exiled in 1973 and they went to Miami.

My family fled Iran in October 1978 as a result of the coming revolution when I was two years old. In the early days, my entire family lived together in a very crowded house, where I shared a room with my sister, cousin, and grandmother, and we would all listen to my grandmother tell stories before bedtime.

I'm an immigrant. I came here when I was 3 months old.

I was born in Cyprus, but my family moved to England when I was about six.

My parents left Libya in 1979, escaping political repression, and settled in Cairo. I was nine.

I never thought I'd be comfortable living outside South Africa, but we love London. Our two kids were born here.

Well you know it's dangerous in politics, because especially in the Philippines there's a lot of killing in politics.

I left Iran back in 1985. I lived in Turkey for a while, then I went to Germany. I joined a theater company there, and we toured the country.

After the 1960 royal coup, I spent time in India - including three years in prison.

I'm an exile. My father had the courage to leave with his wife, his mother and three children under twelve. It took more courage to leave, to sacrifice everything for freedom, than to stay.

I grew up in South Africa, but like many people at that time, I couldn't bear living in the country. The main motivation for moving to Britain was to get away.

My father was a professor of political science and also a young politician fighting for democracy in Kenya, and when things got ugly, he went into political exile in Mexico.

My father was a professor of political science and also a young politician fighting for democracy in Kenya, and when things got ugly, he went into political exile in Mexico. Then I moved back to Kenya shortly after I turned one, and I grew up in Kenya.

I was born in Hereford, England, in 1944. We moved when they had an opportunity to get a visa, about 1950. My dad always thought Europe was a bit too small for him. He wanted to see the United States... The typical immigrant story. He wanted a better life for his children, too. He always tried to get the visa, and it didn't come up.

When I was six years old, my parents told me that we were moving back home to Armenia. I didn't really understand what was happening. My father had stopped playing football, and he was at home all the time.

My family emigrated to the U.S. after the Iranian revolution in 1978.

I left Cambodia when I was 12 or 13. I didn't really escape, but I needed to go away.

I was born in Budapest, Hungary, and moved to the United States in 1956. It was during the Hungarian Revolution when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest, and my family - me, my brother, and my parents - escaped over the border to Austria. We just took whatever we could carry. It was perilous, but we made it across.

When I first came to Columbia University, I was dirt poor. I did not choose to come here - I just ended up here because I had nowhere else to go, having just escaped from China after Tiananmen. I was in a new country where I didn't understand the language, didn't know anybody, and didn't have a penny to my name. So I was desperate and afraid.

As a political exile, you always think you're going home next year.

When my family migrated from Punjab during the Partition, we came to Delhi and I was enrolled in United Mission School.

If anyone has to leave their homeland by boat, they all have difficult stories. But my parents had a difficult journey, and their story always seems like a movie to me.

Because of the Lebanese civil war, I had a scattered childhood. I had to build my own connections to each country we moved to.

When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis.