Quotes About Culture

Spiritually, I'm Jewish.

It was only after 20 years of being dunked in the religious culture that I got caught up in 'religion.' I had no exposure to Christianity as a child. I was not raised in a Christian home. I became spiritually hungry in high school.

My Jewishness and queerness are very interwoven, and, although they sometimes conflict culturally, intellectually and spiritually they deepen one another for me.

You go to Africa, and you see how things are over there. Spiritually, it opens you up.

I think maybe since there isn't a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don't understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out.

Saudi had been a very restricted place. Even on the magazines there, if there was a little leg or cleavage showing, they used to blacken it with a black mark. Me and Ishmeet, so many times, had tried to remove the black portion with our spit, but of course, it would never come out.

We don't have spittoons on street corners any more. It's no longer acceptable to spit on the street.

I learned Punjabi before I learned English in spite of the fact that I was born in Canada.

I think people should know more of Africa in terms of its joie de vivre, its feeling for life. In spite of the images that one knows about Africa - the economic poverty, the corruption - there's a joy to living and a happiness in community, living together, in community life, which may be missing here in America.

The age of the rock star was coterminous with rock n' roll, which, in spite of all the promises made in some memorable songs, proved to be as finite as the era of ragtime or big bands. The rock era is over. We now live in a hip-hop world.

No one hates someone spitting at someone more than I do and it is frowned upon in our country. It is a horrible, horrible thing to do.

There is nothing as fun as making a cultural splash with a movie. Sometimes the splash happens, like with 'Swingers,' where it sort of slowly ripples out, yet everybody could quote it. Or it could be something like 'Elf,' where you just make a big splash right off the bat when the movie comes out.

Even though my father had a really successful career before the '60s, that kind of insane pop-culture splash that happened was so massive. People hear the sitar and immediately think, you know, flying carpets and tie-dyed T-shirts and wafting smoke.

Early on I saw the plastic quality in colored people and had friends among them; and later was to work from colored models and friends, including Paul Robeson, whose splendid head I worked from in New York. I tried to draw Chinamen in their quarter, but the Chinese did not like being drawn and would immediately disappear when they spotted me.

My mum was a children's librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum's work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors.

I guess if you split the difference between the U.K. and the U.S., you would get Canada. But that's just due to proximity. Just because of distance, we get a lot more cultural spillover from America.

There does seem to be a kind of split. There are those people who are more entrenched in the early electronic years, and new people who have come to it because of people like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson.

The Old Vic is special to me because that's where I began. I lived in New Bond Street in London in a flat that cost 4.20 a week. I split the rent with friends. We used to go to concerts, theatres, we went to the Proms.

I think that there's good movies and there's bad movies, and sometimes the bad movies spoil it for the rest of us, and we focus on them, but in the long run, all that matters are the good movies. Those are the ones that we will remember.

Morocco as it is is a very fine place spoiled by civilization.

I am so spoiled. I cannot watch a show where it gets interrupted for ads. I have to TiVo it and skip through the ads, because the culture of advertising is so false and phony that I just... ugh, you know?

Some people say Hawaii is spoiled, but I don't think so. It's modern. It's a part of today's world.

Italian girls are famous for being snobby and expecting men to make the first move. In America, if I don't make eye contact, the guys won't come over and talk. American girls just go for it. You men are spoiled.

Mighty cultures never - are almost never conquered. They crumble from within. And frankly, I think that a lot of Americans are acting like spoiled brats because everything isn't working out perfectly every time.