Marcus Samuelsson Quotes

When I came to Australia in 1987 as an adoptee from India, I could not have had any idea where my life journey would take me.

I've had a lot of different lives. I was adopted, I grew up in Nebraska, and then I went to Northwestern... Then I had this really extraordinary, different life than my parents.

I was a redhead when I first came to America.

I don't have memories of Ethiopia as a child. I didn't learn about Ethiopian culture until after I moved to New York and started meeting people from the Ethiopian community.

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

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

I wanted to acknowledge my U.S. heritage and to belong to it more closely. Having said that, I am certainly British by formation and education and readily think of London as home. I had never lived in the U.S. till 2007.

I'm completely English, but I grew up in Paris and went to school here. My parents moved when I was five.

When I first moved from Shanghai when I was five, I just thought of myself as Chinese.

National identity is something that's directly connected to our personal experiences and the decisions we make, the roads we decide to take at certain points in our life.

I am originally a surd who was born in Delhi in 1982, just two years before the Sikh riots, so all my childhood pictures are in baby frocks with ponytails, as my parents wanted to hide the fact that I was a Sikh boy, given the riots. My dad worked for a travel agency, and we soon moved to Saudi Arabia.

I always thought that a film about how my father's life was shaped in his early years in Hong Kong would be a worthwhile story to share so we could better understand him as a human being and a warrior.

I was born in Senegal in 1996. My mom moved to New York when I was two years old, so I was raised by my aunt back home.

The story of my life is the Chicano experience personified.

I was born in Canada, but both my parents are Syrian - they moved to Canada in the '70s, and I was born in a 100-percent-Arab house.

I grew up Mexican.

I was born in Canada, and then my dad played pro soccer in England and then also on an island off the coast of Portugal. So we lived there for, like, 10 years. And then we moved to Minnesota. So I feel like I've experienced a lot of different cultures, and I'm still figuring out who I am.

To speak about yourself, you must first be able to assemble a sense of origin. For descendants of slaves, this has proved one of the most precious losses of self-knowledge we've endured.

I keep my Scottish connection. I know where I was born, and that's an important part of my history, and I think all immigrants are the same. But if I could live anywhere in the world, it would be Australia.

I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn't identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.

My parents immigrated to this country from Jamaica with no more than a fifth-grade education.

The idea of ignoring your past, only to confront it later in life, is a familiar experience whether you come here from Hungary or French Canada or Ireland.

Certain stories, like my mom leaving when I was 15-years-old to go back to China because she didn't quite assimilate like we did, that was a moment that was very sad in my life.

I grew up in East Los Angeles, which is the biggest population of Mexican-Americans in America. I was born and raised there.

I'm from New Orleans, and I have a French last name - although I have no real relationship with my last name because it's not my name. I don't know my name.