Quotes About Culture

Because this is the other thing about immigrants ('fugees, émigrés, travellers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, "Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing—loads of Indian people." To which you want to reply, "Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing—loads of white people.

All tastes are expressions of belief.

The nineties, ecstatic decade!

Libraries are not failing because they are libraries. Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.

The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity – and to time itself.

Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term 'middle class'. In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say.)

But there have always been these people for whom rap language is more scandalous than the urban deprivation rap describes.

The stupidity/pleasure axis I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to become to receive said pleasure.

The vision Marcia Blake had of these people, and had passed onto her daughter, came tumbling down in a riot of casual blaspheming, weed and cocaine, indolence. Were these really the people for whom the Blakes had always been on their best behaviour? On the tube, in a park, in a shop. Why? Marcia: 'To give them no excuse.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister.

As long as we encourage a culture of victim hood, said Monty, with the rhythmic smoothness of self-quotation, we will continue to raise victims. And so the cycle of underachievement continues.

Where I come from," said Archie, "a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her." "Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, "that it is a good idea.

She was never home. Irie was stuck between a rock and a hard place, like Ireland, like Israel, like India.

software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.

In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite and the source of all culture.

you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? It's a fairy-tale!

A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.

It was the spirit of the times: we applied high theory to shampoo ads, philosophy to NWA videos.

It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them.

Well, maybe I use the wrong word in English. I mean that for Lamin the future is as certain as the past.

When I showed her my well-worn copy of Stormy Weather she reacted in a way I hadn't anticipated, she was offended by it—hurt, even. Why was everybody black? It was unkind, she said, to have only black people in a film, it wasn't fair. Maybe in America you could do that, but not here, in England, where everybody was equal anyway and there was no need to "go on about it." And

In America we are perhaps more accustomed to art that enacts the boredom of life with a side order of that (by now) overfamiliar Warholian nihilism.

Nine SPEAKING IN TONGUES The following is based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008. 1