Quotes About Culture

If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word identity has reached an end.

Consume or die. That's the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.

I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.

Why don't you want to be Jewish anymore? I'm tired of the guilt. That enormous nagging historical guilt. What guilt? The guilt of being innocent victims.

He liked to mingle with shopping mall crowds. "I'm counting on you to tell me, Jack." "Tell you what?" "You're the only person I know that's educated enough to give me the answer." "The answer to what?" "Were people this dumb before television?" One

Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

lonely-chrome America.

This is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.

But then it came time for me to make my journey—into America. [... N]o coincidence that my first novel is called Americana . That became my subject, the subject that shaped my work. When I get a French translation of one of my books that says 'translated from the American', I think, 'Yes, that's exactly right.

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

As pessoas nao vão morrer. Não é esse o credo da nova cultura? As pessoas vão ser absorvidas em fluxos de informações. Não entendo nada disso. Os computadores vão morrer. Já estão morrendo na sua forma atual. Estão praticamente mortos como unidades distintas. Uma caixa, uma tela, um teclado. Eles estão se dissolvendo na textura da vida cotidiana. (...) Até a palavra computador parece retrógrada e burra.

This country is toilet-oriented.

A Greek will never say anything he hasn't already said a thousand times." Her husband Charles reprimanded me for not knowing the word. To Charles it was a mark of one's respect for other cultures to know the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes.

They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.

If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word "identity" has reached an end.

What the hell does the Jewish Museum know about Guatemalan pricks? This particular prick isn't even circumcised.

This is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock.

Food delights us, food unites us, food embodies the soil, the sea and the weather, the farmer's sweat and the fisherman's toil.

He was half-white and half-Korean, but when asked about his ethnicity, he always said Hawaiian, a declaration of racial neutrality that, more often than not, let him avoid further inquest.

Every cultural industry is up for disruption, and the promise is that creators get fully compensated for the value they create.

Some things can only be solved by massive cultural changes, which probably means they will never be solved.

Beauty comes from conscious reflection and experience. It is influenced by knowledge, learning, and culture. Objects that are unattractive on the surface can give pleasure. Discordant music, for example, can be beautiful. Ugly art can be beautiful.

Predicting technology is relatively easy compared to predictions of human behavior, or in this case, the adoption of societal conventions. Will this prediction be true? You

What is natural depends upon point of view, the choice of metaphor, and therefore, the culture. The design difficulties occur when there is a switch in metaphors. Airplane