Quotes About Culture

One of the things that I have my students do is to take a look at English-language newspapers from all around the world in order to see the different ways in which the same story might be told.

My music is the essence of Detroit. At one time, we were the center of the world, man - Motor City.

People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects.

I once wrote that the first week in Jerusalem was the hardest week of my life. I was different, other; my clothes were different, as was my language. All of the classes were in Hebrew - science, bible, literature. I sat there not understanding one word. When I tried to speak, everyone would laugh at me.

In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.

Every book in the 'Dreams' cycle dramatizes a particular epoch in the ongoing cultural collision between North America's native peoples and its European colonizers.

I think that the online world has actually brought books back. People are reading because they're reading the damn screen. That's more reading than people used to do.

Massive numbers of people are going to come online from cultures we don't normally interact with.

I think we live a culture that's obsessed with people, you know, 'Celebrities are just like us!' Everything I do except my job is critically analyzed online.

RSS, as a format and an idea, grew directly out of an internet culture that many people online today know nothing about: Usenet.

You don't need a band to do hip-hop; you only need a DJ.

Success to me would be first and foremost to have a family. I was an only child for 18 years and I'm Latino, so I love big families and creating a small home world.

There is no difference working for Hindi or South films; the only difference is the language.

Now my children also don't have a particular religion as I also didn't have. The only difference is that now they have Muslim and Parsi also in their blood. So they may be called Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, Christian and Parsi!

I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation.

There isn't only one way that black art or entertainment is represented, and that's the most important thing. We're permeating every style. We're claiming and, when necessary, appropriating all kinds of forms. Nothing is forbidden, because it's not what black people do: because it's not what we think of as black art.

The only time you will ever see me in drag is when I am - What? Getting paid. It is my job.

When I was growing up, there were people of color onscreen, but I never saw interracial couples.

Theatre comes alive when someone cross-dresses onstage.

There's a difference wherever you go in Canada, Ontario and the GTA.

I have the Italian flag embroidered onto all my dress-shirt cuffs. I am very proud to be Italian.

Hip hop fans are obsessed, and they're geeks about hip hop. Comic book fans are also geeks, and when you can meld the two, then you open the world up to, I think, communities that will just take to each other.

Ranchi is a much better place than Mumbai or any other big city in the country. People here are simple and open-minded.

In all of my books, I've emphasized that the fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that, for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor.