Quotes About Culture

I got a lot of influence from my father, honestly. He'd take me in his car. I'd hear Carlos Santana. I'd hear Queen. I'd hear all these Turkish people, like, bands that he grew up listening to. He was in a band as well.

If Turkish or Moroccan boys misbehave here, it's up to us to re-educate them and, when necessary, to punish them.

Turkish cuisine is, to my mind, one of the most exciting and accomplished in the world.

We speak Turkish at home, and I can speak the language. I have a lot of family there - I try to fly to Turkey once a year when I have holidays.

Albanians love topiary and fancy doors. They speak Albanian, an Indo-European language with traces of Greek and Latin - and the lek is their monetary denomination, which trades at one hundred to one on the dollar. Their food is excellent, a melange of Greek, Turkish, and Italian cuisine, all very fresh and legume-y.

My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents' education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing.

You cannot transpose the U.S. system on Turkey, and the Turkish system on France etc. You have to understand the people and their culture. That's leadership.

The problems in the Russian novel are quite similar to the problems of Turkish nationalism and Turkish culture, which was something that I grew up thinking didn't affect me very much because my parents didn't really talk about it.

Actually, I've taught creative writing in Turkey, at an English language university, where the students were native Turkish speakers, but they were writing their essays in English, and they were very interesting - even the sense of structure, the conventions of writing, the different styles of writing.

We do not only have a Turkish side, inherited from our parents and our families, we were born and raised in Gelsenkirchen. It is a city with a high percentage of emigrants.

I went to a Turkish hairdresser, and they burned the hair off my ears with a lit taper. They just put the burning candle near your ears and you hear the hair being burned away. And the smell - urggh!

I am very, very proud I am also Turkish and both of my parents are from Turkey. I was born in Germany and grew up there. By playing football, I learned my different cultures, and that is an advantage if you grow up as a person. You get a different view on certain things. I am very, very thankful I was able to pick the best from many cultures.

When I say all of this stuff about Turkey, people don't understand. They think I don't like Turkey. I love Turkey. I love my people. I love Turkish food and everything. But my problem is with the government.

You still miss Turkish people, talking Turkish, you still miss your culture. That's why New York is the best place to be because everywhere you go there's Turkish people, your friends are here, you can go to eat Turkish food every day.

Because of our Turkish roots, we still have a very strong relationship with Turkey.

I grew up in a town in France called Saint-Die, where there were many immigrants - Senegalese, Morrocans, Turks. My parents came from Senegal. My father came first, actually. He was a lumberjack. Yes, a real French lumberjack.

I have always found it jarring to encounter people born and raised in, say, Switzerland, who are denied its citizenship and still considered Algerians or Turks.

My mother was a great storyteller and a great historian in her own way. She only made it to third grade. She came from Mexico City at the tail end of the Mexican Revolution and that kind of turmoil and chaos and frenzy and also excitement.

Our preoccupation has always been to craft space in such a way as to induce social interactions that would in turn generate a sense of community and a culture, but starting from the very immediate issue of how action influences perception.

In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you've become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that's the height of intelligence.

When you go to the Sistine Chapel with Sophia Loren, it can be quite some time before your thoughts turn to the ceiling.

I don't turn to greeting cards for wisdom and advice, but they are a fine reflection of the general drift of the culture.

The Calandra Institute, the Metropolitan Opera Archives, the library at Lincoln Center, and the Fashion Institute of Technology were helpful and key to piecing together what life must have been like at the turn of the last century.

Both of my parents were first-generation Americans, the children of Jews who left Eastern Europe around the turn of the century.