Quotes About Culture

I was in Cannes two years ago at our 'U23D' movie premiere. I love the French.

Learning to read the Bible in the light of the times in which it was written is critical. Reading it uncritically, without understanding the cultural and historical setting of the text, leaves us forced to accept scientific and sociological norms of the ancient Near East from 3,000 years ago.

Just because society, and government, and whatever was different 100 years ago, doesn't mean that people didn't have sex, pick their nose, or swear.

People have to realise you don't help African children singing along to 60-year-old men playing their tunes from 40 years ago.

My early novels were very understated and English. Fourteen years ago, I met and married my American husband, and as I learned more about his background and culture, I became interested in using American voices.

Most important, though, I had to wait until I found the perfect traveling/eating/drinking/napping companion. And I did finally find him, two years ago - my Brazilian-born, French-speaking, wine-worshipping, tripe-consuming, uncomplaining traveler of a sweetheart.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

Years ago, I worked briefly as a consultant for Sciences-Po, one of Paris's famed grandes ecoles, encouraging American high school students and their parents to pursue an English-language education abroad.

Few years ago, it was completely different. Now you go to any country, city, or continent and just say 'Bollywood,' and they will know. So, it means everybody is watching everything.

Thirty years ago dinner theatre used to be much more of a going concern than it is now.

I didn't really discover yakuza films until about five or six years ago.

When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

We regard those other cultures, such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, as undeveloped.

We're absolutely American and distinctly so, I think. That's part of what people respond to outside of this country, part of the reason that we're such a huge band outside of the U.S., where we're not so popular now as we were 10 or 12 years ago.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

Cricket makes no sense to me. I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. That is very cool, but I don't understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didn't understand what they were talking about.

I know that everyone has their own ideas about what the good life is, and hip hop has especially strong ideas about it. It's been the same old thing for years and years: a bunch of females around you, nice cars and money. I wanted people to know what the good life actually is and challenge a lot of the lies that we're told.

I've been banging on about doing stuff in Birmingham for years and years, and everyone says 'We can't, it's the accent thing.' For some reason it's a very difficult accent to get right, harder even than Geordie.

In Japan, the way they act at shows is very different from home because they don't yell, they clap for about 10 seconds after the song and then it's completely silent.

I grew up in a largely black community during the '70s and '80s that scoffed at 'white' music. That music - folk, rock, some disco - was considered soulless, aberrant, just one more example of the Caucasian's desire to scream and yell and demand whatever their privilege and perpetual adolescence dictated they should demand.

In Europe they are all kind of hard. They yell a lot, but they are trying to be honest and try to teach you how to get a work ethic and how to play the right way.

Well I think that's probably one of a few, where I grew up in the City of New York, it's got a lot of energy, my parents are Irish-American so there was a bit of yelling going on in my house but it seemed normal.

There is no singing anymore, everything is yelling and shouting and rapping and that is real boring to a guy like me.