I remember when we were in Egypt as refugees. It was tough, but there was always hope - hope that there's light at the end of the tunnel.
For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.
In the Palestinian camps in the Seventies, I fell in love with a woman fighter - now married with six kids, not mine! - and I seriously considered staying there with her.
I grew up in a refugee camp in Uganda, and I lived there for 30 years. That shapes one's character.
My parents are Vietnamese refugees; they left Vietnam after the war. They were part of the boat people, and they ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand after being on the water for three days, and I was born at that refugee camp in Thailand.
If I'm doing a story on how a single mother copes in a refugee camp, I'll go to her tent; I'll follow her when she's working, see what her daily life is like, and try to pack that into one composition, with nice light, in one frame.
My mother left Hungary as a refugee, and she is not nostalgic for the life that she had back in Hungary, and yet Cubans certainly want the economic opportunity in the United States, but they're desperately homesick for the culture that they left behind.
I remember when I was a kid, as a refugee in Egypt, every day, there was always a hope that we'd get to leave tomorrow and we'd get to go somewhere.
When we were in Egypt, we were refugees. My family and I were homeless. For five years, out of all of the countries in the world that my father was contacting, the only one that took us in was England.
Almost every continent in the world, including our own, has refugees. But how often when we hear the word do we pause to remind ourselves what being a refugee means?
My family had to live in Vienna for three months, then in Italy for another nine, while we waited for refugee status.
The hardship of living in a refugee camp made me psychologically strong.
When the war started, we became refugees, and it was a really tough time. I was six years old. These were really hard times. I remember them vividly, but it's not something you want to remember or think about.
In some respects I have been the most unlucky because I have spent more time living as a refugee outside my country than I have spent in Tibet. On the other hand, it has been very rewarding for me to live in a democracy and to learn about the world in a way that we Tibetans had never known before.
Those who have never suffered the iniquities of exile cannot possibly understand the significance, the gravitas, of a mattress.
You believe what you want to believe. You see, you don't have to live like a refugee.
You cross a border and the policeman or the frontier policeman look at you, What are you doing here? Why are you coming? How long will you stay? Well, if I had nearly enough years, I would write a novel about being a refugee.
In China, it was hard living as a young girl without my family. I had no idea what life was going to be like as a North Korean refugee. But I soon learned it's not only extremely difficult, it's also very dangerous, since North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants.
People have been born in refugee camps and they are getting tired of that.
I come from a family of refugees. I'm used to surviving and going with the flow, and what happened to me was just life.
My parents came from Russia and suddenly they wound up in Boston, Massachusetts, Brookline, Massachusetts and they felt the sun rose and set on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's backside because he meant so much to them. This was freedom. This was something totally different from the Russia they had left.
You know, those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like.
We sure didn't feel like refugees, but in hindsight, I guess we were - my father and mother left everything behind to come here - to be safe and give their boys a chance to rebuild a life.
While my life shifts from refugee camps to red carpets, I choose them both because these worlds can, in fact, coexist. And for me, they must.
I had jobs from the age of 14, when I arrived in London as a refugee. Aged 17, I'd get up at 4 A.M. to work as a cleaner before school. It wasn't pleasant.
