Quotes About Culture

Cities are a melting pot for different ideas, and diversity brings a high-energy rhythm that I don't think we'd know was gone until it was too late.

Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be too clever by half. The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters.

Not too many people out there are interested in Russia so much that they really want to watch things about Russia and only about Russia.

In India, too many people do not write memoirs, but Natwar Singh and P. C. Alexander did.

Too many people go into existing organizations and define success as recreating what is there. To be successful as a startup organization within a large, established culture, you really need to think about how you leverage the assets that are there.

Not too many people draw black people as well as I do.

People don't contest that I'm British as a black man, but they do contest that I'm English. Too many people are going back to an ethnocentric idea of what being English means.

We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.

There's too much of a culture that exists out there, what I call an expectancy culture, of things being provided.

I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.

I try to avoid the 'art world' as much as possible. It's too much about fads and fashions - who's getting the best prices at auction and things like that.

What fascinates me about London is its multi-ethnicity, the coexistence of cultures and religions, but I do not see myself living here for very long. It's too big, too much stress, too much of a metropolis.

My wife has a horror the children will start talking American if we spend too much time out there.

The one thing my mother did make was what was known at the time as lox and onions and eggs. Now, no one makes it with lox; they make it with nova. That was my mother's specialty, which she cooked on New Year's Day for the Rose Bowl games, which we had a party for every year. It took her about an hour to make scrambled eggs.

We took dancehall and hip-hop and mixed it in the middle. I knew we had something. I thought, 'This sound is Puerto Rican sound.'

At the end of the nineteenth century, a fanatical craze for physical fitness swept through Britain. Millions of men and women took up gymnastics, body building, and other physical exercises. Such a thing had never happened before, and it was given a name - Physical Culture.

My mother took me to the British Museum aged five. I had thought people from the past weren't as good as we were, and then I saw the Elgin marbles. Suddenly, the world seemed more complicated.

Being Peruvian means to come from the farthest place possible to get to Europe. Peru is the land of the Incas. It was the capital of South America; it was where the Spanish founded their empire and took over the Inca Empire and made it into a colony of Spain.

When I was a child, my parents took my brothers and me to Port-au-Prince during the summer so we could get to know the country of our ancestors. Because Haiti is an island, the beach is everywhere. Haitians are particular, even snobby, about beaches.

When I joined Google, it was 1,000 people. It took me two and a half years to look around and realize there weren't a lot of people like me.

Subconsciously, Islam took over me, so it was like eighty or ninety percent of the fabric of the person I was.

When we moved to England in 1986, I was ten years old and I didn't know anything about punk or hip hop. The only words I knew in English were 'dance' and 'Michael Jackson.' We got put in a flat in Mitchum, and the council gave us second hand furniture, second hand clothes and a second hand radio that I took to bed with me every night.

I feel that as the world becomes more and more multicultural, it's a good tool to be able to speak another language.

I'm a novelist, a critic, an essayist - I tend to see politics as a subset of cultures rather than the other way around. It's a human enterprise, a tool or a technology revealing our collective inner self.