Quotes About Culture

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book." (Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction) , November 17, 2010)

I didn't feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).

Fred didn't swim either. He said Indians didn't swim.

The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.

I raided libraries and church bazaars for art books. It was possible then to find beautiful volumes for next to nothing and I happily dwelt in the world of Modigliani, Dubuffet, Picasso, Fra Angelico, and Albert Ryder.

It was exciting just to stand in front of the hallowed ground of Birdland that had been blessed by John Coltrane, or the Five Spot on St. Mark's Place where Billie Holiday used to sing, where Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman opened the field of jazz like human can openers.

As we headed back to Tangier we saw a shepherd guiding a camel with her calf. Rolling down the window, I called out: —What is the little one's name? —His name is Jimi Hendrix. —Hooray, I wake from yesterday! —Inshallah! he called out.

Wilma Mankiller, chief of the Cherokee Nation, submitted the eighty-five-letter Cherokee alphabet, hoping that her language would still be spoken a hundred years from now.

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature.

Raymond Chandler invented a new way of talking about America, and America has never looked the same to us since.

He read many books, he looked at paintings, he went to the movies. In the summer he watched baseball on television in the winter he went to the opera. More than anything else, however, what he liked to do was walk. Nearly every day, rain or shine, hot or cold, he would leave his apartment to walk through the city—never really going anywhere, but simply going wherever his legs happened to take him.

the protocols of such gatherings, the sophisticated hypocrisies of supposed art lovers coming to an art show in order to ignore the artworks on display,

One beer too many, and a verbal dispute suddenly and unexpectedly explodes into a punching match. Such things happen every night in bars, pubs, and cafés all across the world, but the bloody noses and aching jaws that generally follow from these dustups in Canada, Norway, or France often turn out to be gunshot wounds in the United States.

The ancient church teaches us that the church sustains three relationships to culture all at once: It is part of it; it is an antithesis to it; it is called to transform it. These relationships are always held in tension with culture.

whatever we do, let us not default to one form of music as the apex of quality and religious acceptability. God is far too creative and God's world far too diverse to be limited to a single cultural expression.

And if you think about it, pretty much everything that made the twentieth century bearable was invented in a California garage: the Apple computer, the Boogie Board, and gangster rap.

This whole city's a Freudian slip of the tongue, a concrete hard-on for America's deeds and misdeeds. Slavery? Manifest Destiny? Laverne & Shirley? Standing by idly while Germany tried to kill every Jew in Europe? Why some of my best friends are the Museum of African Art, the Holocaust Museum, the Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And furthermore, I'll have you know, my sister's daughter is married to an orangutan.

There are many similarities between Germans and blacks. The nouns themselves are loaded with so much historical baggage it's impossible for anyone to be indifferent to the simple mention of either group. We're two insightful people looking for reasons to love ourselves; and let's not forget we both love pork and wear sandals with socks.

a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit.

because I knew that racist Negro Archetypes, like Bebe's Kids, don't die. They multiply.

Factio vestri aevum, non vestri calceus amplitudo. And

Like Nazis at a Ku Klux Klan rally, they were comfortable ideologically, but not in terms of corporate culture.