James Gray Quotes

I feel I have a responsibility to carry out the immigrant story, since it's one that I hold very dear to my heart, since my story is similar in a lot of ways.

My father was an immigrant from Russia and my mother was first generation.

I haven't written about an immigrant experience because I haven't experienced that before and am focused on existential themes.

I'm child of immigrants.

My favorite movie is 'Coming to America.' It's a great movie! Eddie Murphy. Arsenio Hall. It kind of reflects my life - being from Canada and coming to America. I can kind of relate to it.

I come from an immigrant culture. I'm only a couple of generations away from having been a servant girl myself.

My father gave me an old Olympia portable when I was in fourth grade. Our ancestors came from Ireland. Our family stories of immigration helped me understand more about my characters in 'The Lemon Orchard.'

My mother is Ukrainian. She immigrated to the U.S. from Canada as a child.

I'm a first-generation Canadian.

My family were from Jamaica.

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.

My parents were immigrants.

It's probably worth noting that although I'm ethnically Greek, my grandfather was actually born in Turkey and came through Greece on his way to the United States.

There is a lot of my childhood in 'The Sandcastle Girls.'

I am a first generation American, and my family is from Bulgaria.

As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.

My mother's Polish; my dad was Irish.

My parents came to America in the late 1960s because my father studied for a Ph.D. in Indiana. My mother joined him later. We had ancestors who came over at the turn of the century. One worked in a laundry, as is typical of Chinese-American immigrants.

In the 1960s, my first-generation immigrant parents were gifted the olive branch of a blue British passport when working for the British Army in Cyprus. It completely transformed the Paphitis story.

I'm the grandson of immigrants who came across rivers and oceans to get here, some without documentation.

I was an illegal immigrant.

The fact that I am Latino is not a secret. There's not much I can do about that. It is what it is. I think people know that my last name ends in a vowel. What can I tell you?

We immigrated when I was 3 1/2 years old, to Toronto. But I'm still very, very close to my culture and - back home in Egypt.

I've lived all my life in the U.S., but to be brutally honest, I don't really have any ties to the country apart from my mum and dad. Most of the rest of my family live in the Stockport area, and I've always related more to that side of my background.

My family came from Spain in 1725, and if people want to consider me Hispanic, they can, but I didn't advertise that way, and I'm an American first.