Quotes About Culture

I'm very comfortable in the U.S. and Europe, but I feel completely out of place in the rest of the world, mostly because I never spent time outside the U.S. and Europe until I was in my 30s.

People don't realize, or maybe they've forgotten, that there was a time in history when standup comedy wasn't something that you had to hide your kids' ears from.

I think honestly, believe it or not, that Dude, Where's My Car? in a way represents its time better than almost any film made around that.

All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.

I dieted all the time in the Sixties, but we had no idea what dieting meant - we thought it meant not eating anything.

I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were.

Every time I see myself in print or on TV, I feel like a little white girl. I feel fat.

Last time I checked, there were no Americans at all in Renaissance art.

With 'Mad Men,' people who grew up or were living in that time, they love to talk about what it was really like.

An acceptance of your cultural inheritance, and at the same time a dislike of it, is a building block of good art.

Everyone in our generation lives in a world where you're surrounded by all sorts of music all the time. People's tastes are made of combinations of genres.

I'll be a Quebecker-Canadian. I'm from Quebec, and every time I go to a country, I say that. It's my roots, my origins, and it's the most important thing to me.

I mean if it wasn't for The Beatles, none of this, none of the music we listen to would even exist. They're my favourite band of all time.

The only biodiversity we're going to have left is Coke versus Pepsi. We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.

The money is in television. Books are not the dominant medium of our time, so fewer people will create them. In a sad way, books have become a form of "comfort food" we expect to lull us to sleep.

Tel Aviv is the most party time place in the world.

I like New York. There are similarities with London that make it feel rather like home, but at the same time it's slightly fictional.

You know, most people called rap stupid when it started, and it was one of the most innovative music forms of its time.

To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

Often I'll do research just to get a time period correct, but I didn't have to for the '70s... I feel like I can close my eyes and still see it so clearly.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time on film sets all over the world.

I went to Saudi Arabia in 2010, and spent most of my time in Jeddah and the King Abdullah Economic City.

Canadians still spend so much time discussing what it means to be Canadian.

I think hip-hop is actually one of the most challenging things that's happened in music in a long time.