Quotes About Assimilation

After living and working in Milan and Paris, I arrived in New York City 20 years ago, and I saw both the joys and the hardships of daily life. On July 28, 2006, I was very proud to become a citizen of the United States - the greatest privilege on planet Earth.

To start with, I love New York... It's a little bit of the whole world... In New York, the whole world comes to you.

Not only is New York City the nation's melting pot, it is also the casserole, the chafing dish and the charcoal grill.

I don't feel American. I do feel like a New Yorker. I think there's a real distinction there. A city allows you to become a citizen even when you're not a national.

When you live in New York, one of two things happen - you either become a New Yorker, or you feel more like the place you came from.

Unless you're born here, I don't know if you can ever become a full New Yorker.

I don't see myself as either Irish or American, I'm a New Yorker.

I've done a lot of assignment work in my life, and the only way you can do it is to make it your own as quickly as possible, and then you give it back.

I think Brits probably feel that Americans are more like us than vice-versa, if that makes sense. Because we get everything American over here in Britain, but yet there are things which are staunchly English that you guys don't have.

I immigrated when I was six so I had to learn English and I was always an outsider from a young age, and so I think my drive was that I wanted to fit in.

I moved to England at a young age so it was different, unlike other Dutch players as I had to get used to a different culture.

One of the first things people think of when they think of Native Americans is reservations. We didn't have any idea what that was. We were just young kids growing up in normal blue-collar America.

The great trap for non-American actors trying to play Americans, I think, is to start thinking of American-ness as a characteristic. It isn't. It is no more a character trait than height. It is just a physical fact, and that's all there is to it.

Though I don't have any serious argument with Neil Gaiman's 'American Gods', I believe that Americans cease to be Europeans - the land makes them become Americans. You see it happening all the time when you travel around America.

Once the notion of time travel starts to come naturally to the human mind, it is supremely easy to assimilate it into our mode of thinking.

Sometimes I just tell my kids, 'Outside of France, I'm considered completely normal.' This worked until we traveled to London.

Of course, there's no reason that Paris should have decent Mexican food. It's a silly expectation - there's a Mexican population in Paris, but they're not exactly traveling there from across the border. Paris also doesn't do Peruvian all that well, either.

I am an American, not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally.

I think it's important to have had at least a few years of obscurity, where people treat you like everybody else.

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.

Japan took me in as one of their own and treated me like one of their own.

The difference between me and American-born actors is that I came here with the expectation of not being treated fairly.

I have sort of made it my mission to be treated less as a foreigner, less as a guest.

Being half Jewish, we grew up with Christmas trees but had Jewish ornaments.