David L. Wolper Quotes

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

We should all know our family's story, all the more so if nobody tells it to us directly and we have to find it out for ourselves.

Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.

You never realise how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.

My mother was from West Bromwich; my grandfather was Pakistani. I had an aunt who started trying to trace the family tree and stopped when she saw what turned up.

A filmmaker can never be distant from his roots.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

You want to try to find your heritage.

I've known where my heritage is from all along.

I don't know much about my family history except that my father had straight black hair and his ancestors probably came from India.

I've always been a bit of a documentarian.

That's how I got my name, you know. The Bonny scot, see?

I write to tell my grandchildren where they come from, and what their grandparents were up to, and I hope they will in their own way continue. I invite anyone else to listen in.

Where you come from is such a huge part of who you are today.

People will not look forward to posterity who are not anxious to look backward to their ancestry

The same way one tells a recipe, one tells a family history. Each one of us has our past locked inside.

I was researching my family tree, and I was deeply hoping I was going to turn out to be Eastern European, but I'm not.

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.

I come from a family of storytellers.

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.

History is very much bound up in family experience.

It's really cheesy, but basically, 'Roots' got me to find out my own roots.

My heritage has been my grounding, and it has brought me peace.

My family came over from Spain about nine generations ago. I was born in San Diego, but by the time I was four days old, I was on a flight back to Spain because that's where my family was living at the time.

I really appreciate the British part of my family.