Dominic Chianese Quotes

The problems in the Russian novel are quite similar to the problems of Turkish nationalism and Turkish culture, which was something that I grew up thinking didn't affect me very much because my parents didn't really talk about it.

My mum is Croatian, and obviously she's female and she's very emotional, very hot-blooded, very touchy-feely, whereas I think my dad's quite British.

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

My parents didn't really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles.

I'm a first-born child of a Chinese immigrant family, I grew up on the East Coast. And I have to admit, I did not grow up around technology.

I was able to do To Sleep with Anger, a very powerful film about African Americans, their spirituality, and the things that happened within a small community and a family.

I only get angry at my brothers and at my father.

Yes, I am a Mexican, and I have a past and a culture. But what matters is the film itself, not where it was financed or cast.

I loved 'Ghana Must Go' by Taiye Selasi. It's about a first-generation African family living in America that has to return home to Nigeria when their estranged father passes away.

All my friends had grandparents who had accents. I thought all grandparents were supposed to have accents. My friends were all second-generation, as I was.

I didn't grow up watching film but as a Ukrainian-American, music and stories and dance are crucial.

I've been accused of my publicist of being too confessional... it's probably my Celtic upbringing.

Well I think that's probably one of a few, where I grew up in the City of New York, it's got a lot of energy, my parents are Irish-American so there was a bit of yelling going on in my house but it seemed normal.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

My father in the film - which we probably haven't seen in previous movies, and in British Asian movies you could probably count on one hand - he says exactly why, actually why he's frightened for his daughter. He came to this country, England, and had a bit of a crappy time.

There are a lot of things that immigrants, especially Chinese-Americans, want to share with their children, but there are a lot of things they don't want to share.

My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.

I'm the only one in my family with an American accent.

I have been aware since my youth that I am a Hebrew through my mother, and that is something that has played a subtle but important role in my development.

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.

We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Northwest D.C. I was essentially raised by a Panamanian man and a Jamaican woman. That's why I have such a fascination with Jamaican food.

My heritage, many generations back, is Dutch and it was fun to go where nobody asked me how to pronounce my name.

I know when I was little, having my Thai mom, even I was weird about fish sauce and fish heads and clams. I kind of sided with my dad because he was a big American guy. So, we were very meat and potatoes, but I really wish I had grown up appreciating my mom's taste a bit more.

Once you start listening to the comics, be they Jewish, Muslim, Italian, Filipino or whatever, the material often springs from the same source - the overbearing mom, the parents who want you to marry from within your community. That's why the 'Ethnic Show' works so well.

I wanted to explore Korean-American characters. And 'Columbus' did address that. The father-son dynamic felt very real to me.