Quotes About Culture

Is it worth while to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?

When a country loses its identity, it no longer knows what it is or where it comes from and what its real worth is. So it dissolves.

Any city that's worth a dang certainly has a musical heartbeat, a culture, and a scene that can stand on its own.

Culture's worth huge, huge risks. Without culture we're all totalitarian beasts.

I'm under no illusions about the importance of my work. But if it has any worth, it is that it truly reflects the Brazilian people.

It's not worth it, it's not about money, especially when you're dealing with a culture. It should be about elevating the idea of what we are and who we are as people in the cinema, and that kind of stuff keeps dragging us back down.

Retreating to indefinite lockdown culture would mean surrendering what makes life worth living, a far more tragic cost than anything inflicted by a virus.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Marketing has supplanted story as the primary force behind the worthiness of making a film, and that's a very sad thing. It's film only as a function of consumerism rather than as an important component of our culture, and that's everywhere around the world.

That's one reason why it's pretty worthless, I can't totally buy it, if you think about it, it's things like the Phil Spector records. On one level they were rebellion, on another level they were keeping the teenager in his place.

The trick of making movies in this culture is how to not give up everything that makes them worthwhile in order to get them made - and that's a tricky balance.

I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people.

Class has always been Tom Wolfe's subject, and I suspect the reason for much of the disfavor in which he is held.

Today, actors aren't forced to ditch their regional accents like they used to. The best example's Tom Baker, a Scouser who went to great lengths to change his accent and ended up with something alien - and fantastic. It's sad that when the likes of him go, there won't be those sorts of accents any more.

Nowadays, all actors talk about is what they don't eat and what kind of juicers they've got. That wouldn't have been a conversation John Hurt would have had with Tom Baker.

These days it's cool to be ethnic and to be different, but when I was a kid, it was not cool - at all. My friends would come over and my mom would make crepes with eggs, stuffed with mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and spinach. And they'd be like, 'What is this?'

I was always a tomboy growing up in Africa.

The presence of industrial quantities of Byzantine pottery dating from the sixth century AD on the headland at Tintagel, Chinese silk in the tombs around Mecca and 'Arabic' numerals in the 13th-century beams of Salisbury Cathedral tell us we have been interdependent not for decades but across millennia.

I want people to feel what it was like in the '40s. That's when popular music in the United States was so beautiful. Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday. That's when popular music had deeper values, to me. This was music that was selling millions of records.

Remember that what seems zeitgeisty today is the cause of tomorrow's bafflement or, worse, ridicule.

If MSNBC went off the air tomorrow, what difference would it make? If the 'Huffington Post' went out of business tomorrow, what difference would it make?

If tomorrow all of America were to become paternalistic, we would beat the Japanese every day of the week. I think that the concept of accusing someone of running a paternalistic company, that's not an accusation. One should compliment someone on that.

Bill Watterson argued with his medium even as he eclipsed it. He was all too aware that no artistic expression better exemplifies our disposable consumer culture than the daily newspaper comic strip: today's masterpiece is tomorrow's birdcage lining.

In an ever-changing technological landscape, where today's platforms are not tomorrow's platforms, the key seems to be that any one of these spaces can use a dose of humanity and art and culture.